Limitations and Other Details Worth KnowingĪpple Music Wrapped pushes the limits of what is possible to achieve with the ‘Find Music Where…’ and ‘Open URLs’ actions of the Shortcuts app. With this in mind, allow me to clarify a few important points about issues and limitations that are unfortunately outside of my control. While I’m sure I forgot about some weird edge cases (and if you run into issues, please let me know), I’m happy about the fact that this shortcut runs fast, has no external dependencies, and doesn’t save any additional configuration/cache files in the user’s iCloud Drive account. I’ve been working on this shortcut every day for the past couple of months, and I tried to comment every sequence of actions for clarity and future-proofing. The shortcut tries to “fail gracefully” as much as possible, and there are dozens of instances where I had to rely on regular expressions or embedded CSS to prepare the final report. I had to come up with JavaScript-based hacks for sorting numbers and string de-duplication (without actually showing Safari inside the shortcut!), and I figured out a way to load artist profile pictures from the Apple Music CDN (which is not natively supported by Shortcuts). I don’t want to get into all the technical details and challenges I faced when building Apple Music Wrapped, but it is, by far, the most advanced and complex shortcut I’ve ever shared here on MacStories. Because Shortcuts is creating a webpage and sending it to Safari with an extremely long URL scheme (more on this below), you’re going to have to wait a few seconds after Shortcuts launches Safari for the full report to be displayed. Again, tapping ‘Nope’ will continue the shortcut without consequences. Second, toward the end of the shortcut you’ll be given the option to save a PDF version of the report either in the Files app or Dropbox. The Top 25 playlist created by Apple Music Wrapped. It’s not perfect due to the limitations of iOS and Shortcuts, but it’s the closest I was able to come to replicating Spotify’s excellent Wrapped feature. The result is the most complex shortcut I’ve ever created comprising over 540 actions. Official “Apple Music Wrapped” functionality would bolster the service’s catalog of personalized features, providing users with a “reward” at the end of the year in the form of reports and playlists to help them rediscover what they listened to over the past year.īut Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding this feature to Apple Music, so I decided to build my own using Shortcuts. I’ve always been annoyed by the lack of a similar feature in Apple Music I’m surprised that Apple still hasn’t added a native “Year in Review” option – a baffling omission given how the company is already collecting all of the necessary data points in the cloud. I appreciate a detailed look at 12 months of collected data to gain some insight into my habits and patterns. I’ve always been a fan of geeky annual reports and stats about the usage of any given web service – be it Spotify, Pocket, or Toggl. When Spotify was my music streaming service of choice, one of the features I really liked was its personalized Wrapped report generated at the end of the year.
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