iTunes: Enabling “Show in iTunes Library”

iTunes has all sorts of built-in commands for jumping around in your library to find and play exactly what you want. Here, I’m going to discuss one of my favorite Terminal tweaks to enable an easy way to go right to the album or artist of your choice. 

Note that when you select a song in iTunes (no matter what view you’re using), you’ll see a drop-down arrow appear next to its name.

Clicking on that arrow reveals a handy little menu, which by default is labeled Show in iTunes Store. From there, you can select the song, artist, or album to bring up that page in—you guessed it—the iTunes Store.

There is, however, a way to tweak that menu to do something that may be even more nifty. Quit iTunes first, then open Applications > Utilities > Terminal, copy and paste in the following, and hit Return:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

What that’ll do is make each song’s drop-down menu change to Show in iTunes Library, which is a very useful way to jump to the artist or album from anywhere in your music list.

When you make your selection, iTunes will find what you want and open what’s called the Column Browser above it. This means you’ll have a Finder-like three-column sorting window that sits on top of your music list. 

Yes, I know. This only shows two columns. Give me a break, wouldja?

 

To dismiss the Column Browser, hit Command-B (View > Column Browser > Hide Column Browser) or just double-click the small divider below it. Whoosh!

If you’d like to undo your Terminal changes above, quit iTunes again and reverse the command as follows:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool NO

You party pooper.