Trevin Chow

I’m always playing songs in iTunes through a playlist (vs. navigating through the Library), so when I come across a song that I want to delete, I have always used a 2 step process since through the iTunes UI you can’t delete it from the playlist and the library at the same time. I resorted to:

1. Look at the song title
2. Type the song title into search box
3. In the search results, right click and delete the song

This was such a pain in the butt that I always wished there was an easier way to do this straight from the playlist.  Turns out there is!

I found this list of Windows shortcuts on Apple’s site which shows that Shift+Delete is the answer I’ve been looking for:

Shift-Delete

Delete the selected song from your library and all playlists

So when you’re in an iTunes playlist and want to remove the song from the playlist only, use Delete.  If you want to remove it from both the playlist AND your iTunes Library, use Shift+Delete !

(There is also another undocumented shortcut – CTRL + SHIFT + Delete which will do the same thing as Shift+Delete except it will add an extra confirmation for sending the file to the recycle bin. Since you already get one prompt using Shift+Delete, there’s no reason for this extra step)

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