Yesterday, with the help of Shaun Kepert, we solved a nagging iTunes issue.

We need to set the Sidebar in iTunes to always show on our SINC Site Macintosh computers, and we need to accomplish this through the command line since we have to script this.

Shaun finally figured out which preference file was being modified and more specifically what data needed to be modified.

So, here’s the process to change the setting. Make sure iTunes is not running:

1. Copy ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.plist somewhere else to work in it. I will probably put it in /private/tmp/

2. Use plutil to convert the com.apple.iTunes.plist to an xml file from it’s original binary file format.

/usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 /private/tmp/com.apple.iTunes.plist

3. Search and replace with sed (or other method of your choosing) the following text
from: MgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
to: MgBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

We piped the output to a new file.

/bin/cat /private/tmp/com.apple.iTunes.plist | /usr/bin/sed s/MgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA/MgBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA/ > /private/tmp/com.apple.iTunesNew.plist

4. Convert the new file to binary plist file with plutil.

/usr/bin/plutil -convert binary1 /private/tmp/com.apple.iTunesNew.plist

5. Copy the new file back into the appropriate folder: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.plist.

Launch iTunes and voilà, the Sidebar should show up.

We will further test to be sure, but so far it’s looking quite promising.