How to go back to list view of songs in playlists on iTunes 12.6
View menu > View as.
Pick your favourite.
Playlist has 'mini covers' Songs is most minimal, text only.
Unfortunately, it's not a global setting, it's per playlist.
I don't know how to change the default view mode for new playlists, but you can run a script like the one below in Script Editor to change the view mode of all existing playlists.
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with p in user playlists
set view of browser window 1 to p
try
tell application "System Events" to tell process "iTunes" to click menu item "Songs" of menu 1 of menu item "View As" of menu 1 of menu bar item "View" of menu bar 1
end try
end repeat
end tell
Without the try
block the script above would exit with an error when it reaches a "special" playlist like the "Songs" view where the "View > View As > Songs" menu item does not exist. You can remove the try
block if you replace user playlists
with user playlists whose special kind is not none and smart is false
. In my version of iTunes, tell application "iTunes" to name of user playlists whose special kind is not none
returned {"Music", "Movies", "TV Shows", "Podcasts", "iTunes U", "Audiobooks", "Purchased"}
.
I use a script like the one below to create most new playlists. It requires GNU xargs
and readlink
which you can install by running brew install findutils coreutils
.
osascript -e'on run {a}
set l to {}
repeat with f in (get paragraphs of a)
set end of l to POSIX file f
end repeat
tell application "iTunes"
if number of l is 1 then
tell application "Finder" to set n to name of (item 1 of l as alias)
set p to make new user playlist with properties {name:n}
else
set p to make new user playlist
end if
with timeout of 0 seconds -- don't exit with an error if the add command takes over 20 seconds
add l to p
end
set view of browser window 1 to p
tell application "System Events" to tell process "iTunes"
click menu item "Songs" of menu 1 of menu item "View As" of menu 1 of menu bar item "View" of menu bar 1
end tell
end tell
end run' "$(printf %s\\n "${@-$(cat)}"|gxargs -rd\\n greadlink -f)"
If the System Events application is not on the list of applications in "System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility", the script above results in an error like this: 636:751: execution error: System Events got an error: osascript is not allowed assistive access. (-1719)
.
In iTunes using Mac, to make songs within a playlist in list view, simply click on the playlist you want, then click on View on the top menu, then click on As Songs, that gives you the list view.