Confessions of a G33k

Actually, under the right circumstances, it can be extremely useful. As an example. I'm a big fan of musician John Vanderslice, but barring one record store around here, his CDs are very difficult to find. Just out of curiosity, I clicked on the arrow next to Vanderslice's name, and boom, three albums on the iTMS. It kind of serves as a very easy "hmm, wonder if there's more of this on the store" button.

There's more, but, eh. You can just go comment on my blog if you really wanna know. ;)

While I can see the function of offering a link to an iTMS search on any given track, I'm thinking it might have been a better idea to include it as a single UI gizmo; like, rather than links for every song, every artist, and every album being displayed in the track listings, maybe a single link for the selected track, or even a UI button that does such a search for the track/artist/song only on the track currently playing.

I totally agree with mns. It's useful, but it didn't have to be done so downright obnoxiously.

When I first saw the little links I thought they were some sort of correlative thing, like "find all related tracks in my library," but then it turned out to be more marketing crammed down my eyeballs and so I turned it off.

At least Apple's invasive marketing stuff is easy to disable even for casual users, though.

Just found a neat little option for those obnoxious arrow links; hold down the option key before you click them, and it will show you what's related in your own library, instead of sending you to the iTMS. Or, change the default behavior of the links by issuing this:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

which will invert the behavior to default to local, and option-key for the iTMS.

Man, I love macosxhints...