“The very desire to find shortcuts makes you eminently unsuited for any kind of mastery.” Robert Greene.
I have been messing around with apple shortcuts lately and now have three I’m really quite pleased with – I am sharing them here with the caveat that they may not do what you need or want them to do! Please do use them as a base for your own though, or as inspiration for other stuff. The more I think about and get to know how shortcuts work the more things I think of adding in or creating. For example I haven’t even started looking at APIs yet, and if I can get the Discogs API working with it then that opens up many possibilities.
For now though, here are the three I am regularly using.
Create Songlink URL & Copy To Clipboard
This I find really useful for hashtag games on mastodon, or for simply sharing a track with family friends via Signal etc.
The basic flow is:
- Get details of now playing track in Apple Music
- Build URL based on songlink syntax and in markdown format
- Copy URL to clipboard
Then you can paste that URL anywhere you like – I use it for music hashtag games and it saves a lot of typing!
Grab it here
Post Now Playing Track to Mastodon & Buffer
This takes the songlink URL further and uses it to post details about the currently played track in Apple Music.
The basic flow is:
- Get details of now playing track in Apple Music.
- Build URL based on songlink syntax
- Uses a few regular expressions to clean up artist and track names for hashtags
- Checks if the file is local or cloud and sets that to a MusicLocation variable
- Prompt for extra comments (or leave blank)
- Build the post body
- Post to mastodon via Mona
Grab it here
Music Recognition to Mastodon & Buffer
This does a similar job but takes the track details from Shazam.
The basic flow is:
- Open Shazam and recognise music (error if no song found)
- Save track to playlist of your choice
- Get current location
- Read in tracks in Apple Music playlist and get latest item
- Get track details
- Save track artwork to local folder
- Create basic Alt Text for image (working to improve this)
- Use regular expressions to tidy artist name for hashtag
- Prompt for music recognition source – user can put things like a TV programme or venue/restaurant etc.
- Create image attachment from local folder (based on artwork above)
- Build post
- Post to mastodon
Grab it here
I’ll build some more out over the coming weeks and months and post them here if I think they will be of interest.
Let me know if you use them and if you find them useful!