How to Launch iTunes from a link

Posted in Tutorials

It is not well documented, but it is possible to launch the iTunes application on your computer from clicking a link.  For example, if you find a podcast on itunes.apple.com website as shown …

And click on the blue button that says “View in iTunes”, a dialog will popup asking if it is okay to launch an application.  If user clicks the “Launch Application” button in the dialog, it will launch your iTunes application (provided that you have it installed on your computer) and take you to that iTunes podcast in the iTunes Store.

So if the itunes.apple.com webpage is able to do it, so can we.  A closer examination of the dialog shown above shows that the link requested.  See that it starts “itmss://”

I’m not sure what the itmss protocol stands for, but it might be “iTunes Music Store …”

So if we put that link in an anchor href like …

It will launch iTunes when click.  In Chrome, you get a dialog that looks like above screen shot.

In Firefox, the dialog prompt looks like …

It even works in Internet Explorer ( I happen to be using IE 11) …

Finding the iTunes Page

Now the question is how did we find the itunes.apple.com website page that gave us the itmss link?

1. Go to Apple’s Link to iTunes page

2. Click “Go to Link Maker”

3. Search for the podcast …

4. When the podcast is found, click the “Podcast Link” and it will give you the code to a link.

This link will take you to the itunes.apple.com webpage.

And if you wanted a link to go the to iTunes webpage, this is the link to use.

But if you want a link to launch the iTunes application, then you have to find the itmss link as describe above.

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