Linking To iTunes

In my hunt to figure out a way to link straight to iTunes on our church website, I ran across a "how to" that I thought I'd share.  I found it over on Michael Hanscom's site: Ecclectisism.  I use his site every week to post links to our music list so people can purchase the songs on iTunes.  You never know when it may vanish from the web so I thought I'd go ahead and post it here.  Check out our Music Home page to see an example.

Link format (as a single line, broken here for clarity):
itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/
com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?

Immediately following the ending ? are any of four search terms, or a global search term:

• songTerm= (song title)
• artistTerm= (artist name)
• albumTerm= (album title)
• composerTerm= (composer name)
• term= (global, search all fields)

Use & between query items if you are using more than one of the first four (non-global) querys, and replace any whitespace with %20.

Example: building a link to search for U2:

itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/
com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2

Example: building a link to search for U2's 'The Joshua Tree':

itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/
com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearch
Results?artistTerm
=U2&albumTerm=
the%20joshua%20tree


Be sure to type all of the above as one line (formatting issues with Typepad caused this to break up in a strange way).