If you’ve updated iTunes to 10.0.1 in the last day or so, you might have noticed that Ping is pushing itself in your face rather more forcefully than before.

One thing: there’s the Ping sidebar on the right. Another: there’s a new Ping drop-down menu that appears in your music library, alongside any song you have selected.

They’re fine if you use Ping, but if you don’t, you might want to get rid of them. The sidebar is easy to deal with, you can hide it with a click. But the drop-down menu requires a little more tinkering to get rid of.

There’s no official preference for removing it, but there is a hidden one which you can switch on and off with a simple command in Terminal.

Here’s how to do it.

Quit iTunes, and open Terminal. Copy and paste this into a single line: defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE Hit return. Restart iTunes. The Ping drop-down will be gone.

To bring it back if you change your mind later, repeat the command with FALSE instead of TRUE at the end.