By Julian Prokaza on Wednesday, 10 September 2008
 Although we haven’t had much of an opportunity to put it through its paces, iTunes 8 has made a pretty positive first impression so far. The new Genius auto-playlist and music recommendation feature is both clever and genuinely useful
What we don’t like, however, is Apple’s decision to foist the Genre column upon us in iTunes’ Browser view whether we want it or not. Previous versions of iTunes had the option to disable this column, but the option is missing in iTunes 8 – for no good reason.
So, rather then simply complain about yet another example of Apple’s “we know best” philosophy getting seriously out of hand, we thought we’d figure out a fix. So, if you want to get rid of the Genre column in iTunes 8 (both for Windows XP and Vista) in Browser view, read on.
We’re assuming you have iTunes 8 installed and running for this short how-to guide – if not (perhaps that Genre column has so far dissuaded you), you can grab it from the iTunes site.
This fix is also far from straightforward, and you’ll also need a text editor that won’t introduce its own wacky formatting into the preferences file we’re going to be editing. Notepad won’t do, but the free Notepad2 will (direct download link) – download it to your Desktop and unzip the file before you start (no installation is required).
If you’re running iTunes 8 under MacOS X, the fix is far simpler – see Tech Recipes for full details.
Step 1
Quit iTunes and locate the iTunes preferences file – iTunesPrefs.xml. The easiest way to do this, both for Windows XP and Windows Vista is to press [Win] + [E] to open a new Explorer window, and then type %appdata% into the address bar. This will open the Application Data folder – you then just need to navigate to Apple Computer > iTunes. You should then see the iTunesPrefs.xml file.
Step 2
Copy the iTunesPrefs.xml file to the Desktop to make a backup. Then run Notepad2 and drag the original iTunesPrefs.xml file onto its window to open it.
Step 3
Scroll to the end of the file and insert the following code starting on the line before the second-to-last </dict> tag at line 2267 – the screenshot below makes this clearer. You can copy and paste the code – just be sure to keep the capitalisation intact.
<key>show-genre-when-browsing</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>
 
Step 4
Save the file, start iTunes 8 and the Genre column will have been disabled in Browser view. You can reverse this change by deleting the custom code from the iTunesPrefs.xml file.
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