Music Hub: A Shortcut that's helping me keep track of Music Consumption

I’ve been on a quest since the beginning of the year to bring more music into my life. I’ve written about it extensively here. Last week, while listening to the recent episode of two of my favorite podcasts, AppStories and the Automators podcast, I was inspired to take an idea I’d been tossing around in my head, to the Shortcuts app, to see if I could make it a reality. It’s nothing earth shattering nor is it very complex. That’s the cool thing about the Shortcuts app, it has capacity to help nerds like me try to create automations that scratch an “itch” we have, in this case the “itch” was trying to figure out how to start my Timery Music timer whenever I open a select few apps, on my iPhone XR.

Before creating this Shortcut I would open a music app, start using it, then go to a Shortcut I created to open the Timery Music timer all to document the amount of time spent listening to music. Then I listened to the podcasts I mentioned above. Readers of this blog know that my Yearly Theme is the Year of Gain; meaning that I am constantly trying to “gain” insights from things I’m experiencing. Sometimes these insights can be categorized as “one-to-one” while other times the insights I gain are more subtle. This was the case with my consumption of both podcasts. While listening I thought, there has to be a way to get the Shortcuts app to help me reduce the friction I was feeling opening one app then going to my timer Shortcut to start a timer. The conversations the hosts were having “gave me permission” to go and experiment.

The first thing I did was decide which apps I wanted to use. I chose Marvis, Music, Sonos, and MusicHarbour. What I wanted was relatively simple; a way to search for the app I wanted to open, have Shortcuts open it while simultaneously opening my Timery Music timer. This first picture shows my first step…

I named the Shortcut after creating it and running it successfully; it’s called Music Hub. The first thing I had to do was find the right action. I chose the Scripting action “Choose from Menu” because it allowed me to do the first thing I wanted from the Shortcut, gain access to the apps I wanted to have the ability to open. All I had to do was list them in the prompt section, as shown.

This next picture shows what had to happen next. I had to pick what I wanted to happen from the menu which was for the app to open, so I used the Scripting action “Open” and chose each app, in the order I listed them in the first step. Notice the little connecting, vertical line between the name of the app and the Scripting action to “open” the app. This is very important. In order for the Shortcut to work, I had to make sure the name of the app, from the Choose from Menu script was connected to the “open” script for the app. It took me a few tries to get it to work but once I figured out why it wasn’t working, it was as easy as dragging and dropping the actions in place…as seen here in the second picture.

This last picture shows the last step.

With the menu portion of the Shortcut closed, all I had to do was go back to add the last action. This last action is app specific so I went to the Timery actions, chose “Start a timer,” then, within the Shortcut, picked the timer I wanted to start…the Music timer.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, Music Hub is not earth shattering. It’s not complex or sophisticated. What it is is the realization of an idea that scratches a minor “itch” I had each time I started listening to music. Since getting this Shortcut to work I’ve deleted 2 other Shortcuts I’d created, one that just opened the Sonos app and one that started the Timery Music timer.

Now if I could just figure out how to scratch my new “itch;” automating the Timery Music timer to stop when I finish listening to music!