Tara Devlin
Home
Portfolio
UX Blog
Siri Shortcuts
Suggestions
Keep in touch
Twitter
LinkedIn
Message me
RSS Feed
Tara Devlin's Website Home >Siri Shortcuts>

Get Karaoke Version

Have you ever been listening to a song on your phone and thought, I wonder if there's a karaoke version of this? This shortcut searches the iTunes store for karaoke versions of music. You can choose if you want it to search using the current song, or a specific song, or pick a random song from your music library.

No items found.

Get Karaoke Version

How to use

How to use

Run the shortcut. The shortcut will first ask if you want to search for the current song that's playing, or a specific song, or pick a random song from your phone's music library.

The first thing the shortcut does is determine what song you want to get a karaoke version of. You can choose a specific song, get the currently playing song if there is one, or pick 25 random songs from your phone's library and search for each of them.

If any results are found, you can preview or purchase the music right from within the shortcut. That's it!

How it works

How it works

The shortcut basically performs an algorithm I wrote to search the iTunes store.

First the shortcut asks the user what they want to use the search the iTunes store:

  • The currently playing song
  • An artist and song title they choose
  • Search 20 songs selected from the user's music library on their phone

Then the shortcut collects two different search terms for the requested music: 

  1. "song name" by "artist" "karaoke" and
  2. "song name" "album name" "karaoke"

Then the shortcut searches the iTunes store.

It removes any results that don't have the word "karaoke" in them somewhere to remove false positives.

Then it presents the results for the user to review.

Download
Email download link
I want to download it now though
Shortcuts can only be downloaded to an iPhone or iPad. Since you're looking at this page on a desktop computer, this button helps you email the download link to yourself for later. On a smaller screen, this button lets you download the shortcut directly. I'm typing out this message because I want to impress you.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Some shortcuts will automatically show up in your phone’s Share menu under “Shortcuts”.
  4. 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.
  5. 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".
Author:
Tara Devlin
FIRST POSTED:
March 4, 2020
LAST UPDATED:
September 25, 2020
EXPLORE:
Music
Friends
^ to top of page
NEXT  >