If you already upgraded to iTunes 8.0, you may have notice that the option to turn off those little arrow links that point your music tracks to the iTunes Store is no longer there. In iTunes 7, there was a preference to disable the links to the iTunes Store, these are the small arrows that appear when you select a song in your library. In iTunes 8, that preference is gone. Thankfully there is a simple solution to this problem.

If you’d like to disable the iTunes Store link arrows, quit iTunes, open Terminal, and run this command:

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

Relaunch iTunes, and voila, no more arrows! To reverse this behavior, you can repeat the above command (quit iTunes first), but replace FALSE with TRUE. (Or, if you prefer, you can completely delete the added preference with

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links). [via macosxhints]

And for the Windows users, here’s the fix:

1. Ensure iTunes is not open. Browse to the iTunes Application Data folder (C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes on XP, C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes on Vista, substituting the drive letter and the user profile name where necessary.
2. Backup and open the iTunesPrefs.xml with a half decent text editor (ie not Notepad, my personal preference is Notepad++)
3. Find the User Preferences key, and below the <dict> tag insert:
   <key>show-genre-when-browsing</key>
   <data>
   AA==
   </data>

   to disable the genre column in the browser, and:

   <key>show-store-arrow-links</key>
   <data>
   AA==
   </data>

   to disable the links to the store.

4. Start iTunes. [via Ocram's Blog]

I haven’t upgraded my iTunes yet, I’m still waiting for more reviews from users and so far we already have two issues about the iTunes 8. First is the BSoD issues with the Vista users and now this. Its a good thing to wait before updating some softwares and this is just some of the reasons I wait before I upgrade.