You can disable the new iTunes Ping sidebar from appearing in iTunes 10.0.1 by using the following command within the Terminal:



defaults write com.apple.iTunes disablePingSidebar 1

Then relaunch iTunes for changes to take effect, this also disables the Ping button from appearing in the corner of iTunes, as you can see in the above screenshot.

You can reverse these changes and get the Ping sidebar back by using the following command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes disablePingSidebar 0

Again, you’ll need to relaunch iTunes for changes to take effect.

Likewise, you can also disable the Ping pull-down menu button that appears next to songs, which cleans up the iTunes 10 interface quite a bit.

Disable iTunes Ping sidebar in Windows

The addition of Ping was affected the Windows version first, here’s how to disable the sidebar. First, quit iTunes, then:

From the Start menu go to the ‘Run’ command

Enter the following exactly:

"C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt disablePingSidebar 1

Run the command

iTunes will now execute running that command and the Ping button will be turned off