Using Personal Automations To Play a Wake-Up Song, Podcast Or Playlist

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at using a Shortcut's automation to play a song, a podcast, or a playlist when you wake up in the morning.

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So unfortunately you can't have Shortcut's Automation play at a specific time. It will instead give you a Notification at that time and you have to take an action to play that shortcut. But there are certain actions that we take naturally like turning off our alarm in the morning that we could use to trigger an automation. So in this example we're going to have turning off your alarm trigger playing a song. We will also look at how to have it play a podcast instead of a song and how to have it play a whole playlist. Not just any playlist but a playlist specific to which day of the week it is. It's easy for me to show you here using the Shortcuts app on the iPad but this works exactly the same way on the iPhone as well.

So first let's create the alarm. I'll go into the Clock app here and make sure I'm in the Alarm mode. Hit the Plus button here and Create a New Alarm. We'll have it repeat on every weekday and it doesn't  matter what sound we use. The sound will play just as normal and we'll allow Snooze as well. The automation will only play when you actually stop the alarm so you can snooze it a few times and then stop it. Then your song will play. So it's saved here and we've got that saved alarm.

Now let's go to the Shortcuts app. In there we will tap on Automation at the bottom and create a personal automation. We'll use Alarm as the trigger for it. We'll set it to when the alarm stopped and we'll change it so not just any alarm or a special wakeup alarm that you can set but existing alarms. All your alarms will be listed here. So select that alarm. Hit Done. Go to Next and now you get to choose what happens in the Shortcuts. So I'll choose Add Action here.  I can go to Media and under Media there is a way to start a song playing. So Play Music. Now we have to tap here to select the music from our library. Songs and we can select a song like this one right here. Hit Next there and now we can see the summary. Now we have to change it. So instead of asking us before it runs it just does it automatically when we stop the alarm.  So we'll turn that off. It will confirm. So when we hit stop this automation will play and we will get that song.

Now you may say now wait, what's the big deal because we could have done that without Shortcuts in the Clock app. I can go into this alarm here and I could say change the sound and pick a song. So the difference here is, of course, that song would play as your alarm to wake you up. Whereas this song will play after your hit stop. So basically your get up and go music. Let's go and have it play a podcast instead.

So in the Shortcuts app we'll go back into this Automation. Select it here and I will change it by tapping there and I'll take away music there. Instead I'll go in here and I'll have it play a podcast. Let's go and just search for podcasts in here so you can quickly get to it. In here you can see Play Podcasts. I can tap on the podcast, you have to have the podcast already subscribed to in the podcast app there. So now it will play that podcast when I hit the Stop button.

But what about something else. What if you wanted to play a song but you wanted to play a different song everyday. You can do that as well. So let's get rid of the play podcast thing here and let's Add an Action and I'll hit the X there to go back up here. Go into Scripting and let's do an IF. So in IF we can do an Input and a Condition. So the Input I'm going to choose the current date. Now if I tap on the current date there I could change the format to Custom. It says here Custom Format. I go into that and that I'm supposed to use the Unicode Tactical Standard 35. So I could look into that easily enough. If you do, if you do search for that, you'll see what all these letters mean. I could see that four capital E's like that will give me the day. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So I'm going to get the current date special format this custom just the day.

I'm going to say IF it is, and I can change it to Monday, and now I can play a song. So we'll go back to Media again and I can do a song that relates to Monday. So I'll clear that result there and I'll go into the library and I'll look at my songs. I'll see that I've got a song here that fits perfectly. I'll drag that in here in the IF. So IF the current day is Monday then play that. Otherwise do nothing. But I can do something with the Otherwise there. I can add another IF statement. So I can go and add, say, Otherwise IF and I can move this IF statement inside of the Otherwise like that. Then I can say Otherwise IF Tuesday. Then put another inside that Otherwise IF Wednesday.

So what about instead of all those IF statements you could just play a playlist based on the name of the day. So let's add an Action here and let's search for date. We'll come up with Format Date here which is what we want. We could choose Format Date and say the Current Date and under Show More we could choose the date Format. So we could go in here and say we want Custom and then we could Edit the Custom to be those four E's again so we get the name of the current day. So this would require, basically, for you to make different playlists in the Music app. Like a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday playlist. Then it would play the appropriate one.

So let's try that out. I'm going to hit the Play button here. You could see the result is Tuesday there. Great. So we want to feed that into a playlist. So the next one we want to add is something to do with playlist. So let's search for Playlists and we can go to Music. We can see Get Playlist. That's what we want. Get the songs in playlist, we'll tap that and we'll say Magic Variable and select formatted date. So it's going to take the result of this formatted date and use that to get the playlist with the same name. Then all we need to do is have it play based on that. So we'll look for Play and here's Play Music. So we put that after that. Play Music automatically feeds in playlist into that. You can see the line connecting that. So now when that alarm goes off it will look for the playlist with the same name as the current day, like Tuesday, and then play it.

You can modify those playlists as you like. It's always going to play the current version of that playlist as your motivational music when you turn off your alarm.