A couple of handy (simple) shortcuts for Apple Music hoarders

Hi everyone, still feel like a ‘noob’ with automation but discovering new and exciting things with Shortcuts and Drafts especially all the time.

I’m a working musician and an Apple Music subscriber, and one of the problems I frequently run into is just the unruliness of my inevitably large Apple Music library. 10 years ago I was pretty good at corralling things into iTunes playlists or smart playlists, but in the days of iOS devices, libraries that can grow as easily as tapping the ‘Add’ button in Apple Music, and having children (had our first 5 years ago, suddenly I had less time for fiddling with my Music collection), it’s become a jungle.

So, I made a couple of shortcuts to figure out what’s happened and enjoy some of that content without it being a chore or a time-sucker. These work much like smart playlists in iTunes (sorry, that’s called Music now too), without actually creating a playlist – it all just goes into ‘up next’. The first is ‘Shuffle recently added’ which looks for any music added in the last 2 weeks, and shuffles it.

The second is ‘Shuffle unlistened’ which finds anything added to your library more than 4 weeks ago, with a play count of less than 2, limiting its results to a random 60 tracks just so nothing breaks. I find this one really useful for siphoning through things I’ve added to my library over the years but never got around to listening to. Sure, it’s a complete shot in the dark what it might throw up next, and perhaps smarter minds could work out better ways of carving up the library to deal with this kind of stuff, and maybe I’ll try one day; but this works for me for now.

I would share a third shortcut, but as a newbie apparently I can only share 2 links. This is ‘Play all of current album’ and helps when a random track does come up that I really like. This may even be something I adapted from Apple’s own Shortcuts Gallery. It allows the current track to finish playing, adding the complete album to ‘up next’. This is great with any kind of playlist shuffle you might have going on.

I have more; the Music folder is one of the largest I have in Shortcuts at the moment, and includes a master shortcut to run most of the others of course, which I put on the home screen next to my Music app icon. Thanks to everyone I’ve learnt something from on the show and on here so far! Hope this helps someone.

1 Like