I just downloaded and installed itunes 8 last night, only to find that they removed two options that I rely on: disabling the links to the itunes store and hiding genre while browsing.

I don’t buy music from the itunes store, so why would i want to see three little arrows taking me to the store, esp to buy music I already have. I also completely disregard the genre tag of mp3’s. Partially because I have a hard time fitting music into genres anyway, and partly because its both subjective and irrelevant. What is one genre to me is another to someone else.

Thanks to these two macosxhints articles, you can have those options back and reject Apple’s imposing of store and genre on your music listening.

Shut down itunes, fire up the terminal, enter these commands, and restart itunes.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

done.