One-touch Music Starters
These are two shortcuts that automatically start the music of your choice playing on your phone. One of them starts a playlist you specify and the other one automatically creates the playlist for you based on parameters you specify.
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Dynamic Playlist
This shortcut makes it easy to quickly get some music playing that you haven't heard in awhile. When you run it, it pulls out all the songs in your phone's music library that meet whatever criteria you specify, then plays them at random. (I never got into streaming music via Spotify, why spend money & precious, precious data to get access to something I already have? Pay money to give up something I already have just so The Algorithm can give me stuff I never actually like? Couldn't be me.)
How to use
How to use
Setup
When you downoad the shortcut, you can edit the criteria under the "Find music where" action to be whatever you would like. I like to use the "Comments" field in iTunes to label songs for this purpose, so that I can say "Exclude songs with the "Christmas" or "Instrumental" labels"; but you can use any criteria you prefer. You can also edit the number of days that you'd like to go back.
If you wanted to, you could modify the shortcut to give you a menu when you run it that lets you specify these things every time you run it, but I prefer a one-button experience.
You can also customize it to open up your favorite music player app if you prefer another one over the default.
Using
Just add the shortcut to your home screen and hit it when you want some music. That's it!
How it works
How it works
- First the shortcut figures out the date that equals 20 days before today.
- Then the shortcut finds all the songs on your phone that match the criteria you give it and sorts them at random.
- Then it adds the songs to your phone's "Up next" queue and starts playing.
- Finally it opens up the Music player so you can control the music.
Start Music Mode
A pretty simple shortcut that I built for quickly starting the music before I drive by just hitting 1 button my home screen.
How to use
How to use
- Run the shortcut.
- It will play your selected playlist using Apple Music.
- Then it will open the CS Music app. If you don't have this app, it's easy to edit the shortcut yourself to remove this command or have it open the music player of your choice.
How it works
How it works
- When you download the shortcut it will prompt you to select your favorite playlist.
- When you run it, it will go get that playlist.
- It sets the playlist to shuffle and no-repeat and starts it playing.
- It opens up my local music player of choice, CS Music. I like CS Music because it has a cleaner and more efficient UX, and it lets me easily down-rate songs I don’t want to hear anymore.
How to get started with Shortcuts
If you have iOS 13, you already have the Shortcuts app. That means that if you're on your iPhone or iPad right now, you can just click the Download button to download a shortcut. If you're not on your phone, you can email the link to yourself to download it later.
You can can start using most shortcuts right away, unless they work with another app that you need to have installed. That will be indicated on the in the post above. Once you have downloaded a shortcut, it belongs to you and you can make any changes you like. The shortcuts I make and publish here don't send any data back to me and I don't make any money from publishing them.
Once you have download a shortcut you can choose how to run it. These are your options:
- When you want to run a shortcut, open your Shortcuts app and all the shortcuts in your library will be there to choose from. Just tap on it.
- To save the step of navigating to your Shortcuts app you can add a shortcut to your iPhone’s home screen so it’s easily accessible.
- Some shortcuts will automatically show up in your phone’s Share menu under “Shortcuts”.
- In the shortcut’s settings you can “Add to Siri” by recording a phrase that will trigger it. Later you can say “Hey Siri” followed by that phrase and Siri will run that shortcut for you.
- You can also set up shortcuts to run automatically in the Automations tab in the Shortcuts app. You can select from a good variety of triggers such as "When my wake up alarm stops" or "When I arrive at work".