Saturday 1 November 2014

iTunes 12: hacking the playlist font sizes

In iTunes 11, there were only two options for the font size in list views. The ‘small’ size corresponded to a font size of 12, the ‘large’ size was 15. It was possible to change these font sizes by editing the TextStyles.plist file (for your specific language) inside the iTunes app bundle. The two relevant keys were 9002 and 9003.

In iTunes 12, the old choice between three list sizes was reintroduced. However, the font sizes associated with ‘small’, ‘medium’, and ‘large’ have been assigned dubious values: they are 11, 12, and 13 respectively. There is even less difference between smallest and largest than in iTunes 11. The row heights do change quite drastically, resulting in an overly spacious display for the large size.



Editing the same keys in the plist as before has no effect. After looking around a bit, I found the keys that are currently used: they are respectively #17920, named “Label” (this is actually the large size), #18688, named “Label_Medium”, and #18944, named “Label_Small”. It may be necessary to edit the other keys with similar names to get a consistent result. For instance, to revert the ‘large’ size back to its former 15 point size, you would need to ensure the Label, Label_Emphasized, etc. entries look like this:

        <key>17920</key>
        <dict>
                <key>- loc hint -</key>
                <string>Label</string>
                <key>font</key>
                <string>_HelveticaNeueSystem</string>
                <key>size</key>
                <integer>15</integer>
        </dict>

Of course, this hack needs to be re-applied after every iTunes update. You may want to keep a backup of the edited plist file so you can simply copy it (although you should check whether no other values have changed in the update).