It’s a coincidence that Macworld published an article of mine today about using keyboard shortcuts to navigate iTunes, and that I have another tip for saving time with keyboard shortcuts in iTunes.
My son asked me today if there was any way to love tracks from the keyboard. He likes to rate music in his iTunes library using loves, rather than stars, and he wanted a quicker way to do so. There is no built-in keyboard shortcut for this, but if you have a Mac, you can set one up.
Go to System Preferences, click the Keyboard icon, and then the Shortcuts tab. Select App Shortcuts, and click the + button. In the Application menu, choose iTunes, and type Love as the Menu Title. For the Keyboard Shortcut, I’ve selected Command-Shift-L (I’ll explain why later).
This shortcut activates the Song > Love menu item. When you want to love a track, you must first select that track; a quick way to do this is by pressing Command-L. So, if you press Command-L, then Command-Shift-L, you can select and then love a track. (I would have used Command-Option-L, but that’s already used by iTunes to display the Activity window.)
What if you want to un-love a track? You can’t use the same shortcut, because the Love menu item becomes Loved, with a checkmark before it, when a selected track is loved. So you need to add another keyboard shortcut for Loved, to select that menu item. And to make this easy, you can use the same shortcut, Command-Shift-L. So, if you want to unloved a track, press Command-L, Command-Shift-L.
Note that this only works for tracks in your iTunes library, not for anything you’re streaming from Apple Music or playing on Apple Music Radio. This is because you cannot select a track that’s streaming and not in your library.