For infrequent users of the iTunes Store, here is an AppleScript to enable and visit the Store within iTunes, then leave and disable it.

This may or may not be new but I never noticed it until iTunes 10. I was downloading a podcast and noted that in the Downloads area in the iTunes sidebar the 'X mins remaining' status and clicked on the actual text by accident. Doing this added the current rate as the podcast was being downloaded to the display. Like I said before, this may be old news but definitely cool if it's just been added.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described, in iTunes U as well as podcasts, so I assume it's just a general feature of downloads in iTunes. This has probably been around a while, but I didn't see it documented here. As mentioned in this previous hint, it can be worth it to monitor the bandwidth usage in case you have some other bandwidth-hungry application running.]

In older versions of the iPhone OS software, it was possible to enter Field Test mode to get a lot of useful data about the cellular connection. This capability was removed in iOS 4.0, and caused some angst while trying to examine the iPhone 4 antenna reception issues.

The ability has been restored, although to a greatly limited degree, with iOS 4.1. Once again, if you dial the number *3001#12345#* in the keypad you will enter FTM. What you will see now is a negative number (presumably representing the signal loss in dB) in the upper left that replaces the cellular signal strength bars. A more negative number means lower relative signal strength, so the -121 I have at the moment is worse than the -92 I had in a different room in the house. Zero would be no signal loss.

To exit Field Test mode, just press the Home button. It may take a moment for the number to go away and be replaced by the bars again.

I think we all hope that when iOS 4.2 is released (Apple says in November) it will restore full Field Test mode with all the diagnostic data available, and maybe bring it to the 3G enabled iPad as well.

In iTunes 10 Grid View: Genres, you can create your very own icons to represent any genres you like, even custom genres.

As you can search the archives, many users are in the Terminal and wind up finding about the various shortcomings Terminal.app from Apple has had and still has. Since the 10.2 days, iTerm has been an alternative project that offered many needed fixes for daily Unix usage and has always remained open source, allowing for future submissions.

I recently had a hard drive failure and had to resort to a backup of iTunes. However, iTunes couldn't find many tracks, as it was still looking for them on the old drive.

Despite manually editing the library files, I couldn't get iTunes to look on my new drive for the several hundred files it had mistakenly misplaced. The only way was to play each one, wait for it to not find the drive and then use the 'Locate' button to find each file.

There are a lot of people who don't care for the new iTunes 10 icon. Several replacement icons have already been created. There was a previous hint about how to change the icon.

Another option is to use the freeware DockArt plug-in for iTunes is another option. It will replace the iTunes dock icon with the currently playing album cover. This plug-in has been around for a long time, but it still works perfectly with iTunes 10. The download includes documentation in a readme file, and the installation process given below in excerpted from that. There are several other options mentioned, so be sure to give it a read.

Apple introduced the 'Ping' music social networking service along with iTunes 10. Part of the point is to share music likes and dislikes with other users.

There is an obvious 'Like' button by albums in the iTunes Store, but what about an individual song? It turns out that over on the right hand side, next to the 'BUY' button for the song, the little arrow with the pulldown menu now has a 'Like' option for that song, and if you've signed into Ping it will post that to your recent activity.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. I'm not sure yet about Ping, although I've signed up. Perhaps if it ties into the App Store and the iBooks Store, and maybe the upcoming iOS Game Center and even MobileMe it will become useful as a social network. I think maybe a poll is forthcoming.]

In iTunes 10, if you select multiple speakers with the new AirPlay feature iTunes will allow you to fine tune the output volume of each speaker.

If you are struggling with the new low-contrast icons in iTunes 10, here is a hint to change the appearance.

In the terminal enter:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes high-contrast-mode-enable -bool TRUE

This will give a high-contrast side bar and listing pane. To undo this repeat the command but change the TRUE to FALSE. I haven't managed to get the color icons back yet though.

The preference AppleAquaColorVariant is next in the list after high-contrast-mode-enable and also does something, unfortunately every value I've tried so far prevents iTunes from launching. If you want to experiment, you can remove it to fix iTunes with:

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes AppleAquaColorVariant

[crarko adds: I tried this, and what it does is go from black on white to white on black. That certainly is higher contrast but I don't know how appealing that will be. I may try it for a while. If anyone has success with the AppleAquaColorVariant setting please submit a hint about it. That would seem to be a more desirable change.]