Apple Music to Obsidian

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As a new years resolution, I decided to give Obsidian another go; so far I am impressed with how the plugin ecosystem has developed since my last attempt to use the app.

One of the categories of data I want to capture in my 2nd Brain is music that I like.

The goal of automating this process is to streamline the workflow and make it easier to get all of this information into Obsidian without having to manually copy and paste everything.

There is a plugin called Obsidian Media DB that is very useful, but ultimately there are gaps in the metadata that it will capture, resulting in me building my own approach. To accomplish this, I created a Shortcut to capture metadata relating to the current song playing in Apple Music.

The Shortcut will create a new note about the song incorporating the metadata that I require to create an archive of music.

Music metadata

With the use of the Dataview plugin and the Minimal theme I can create a dashboard of the captured song data that also allows me to play the song directly from Apple Music.

Music Gallery

--- cssClasses: cards, cards-cover, cards-1-1, table-max tags: music --- ```dataview TABLE WITHOUT ID link(file.link,title) as "Title",artist as Artists, ("![|100](" + cover + ")") as Cover,year as Year, genre as Genre,("[▶️](" + url + ")") as Play FROM "Media/Music" SORT artist asc ```

As part of the process, I also save the song to a Playlist within Apple Music.

It is early days as yet, but I am liking Obsidian’s ability to quickly capture and catalogue music, movies, TV series, books and webpage information.

Automating the process of capturing data for use in Obsidian can save you a lot of time and effort and make it easier to keep your vault organised and up-to-date. Whether you use plugins, Shortcuts or custom code, there are plenty of options available for streamlining this process.

Find more automation workflows at logic2Design.com.

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Very interesting solution!
But where do you see the advantage of your system, over just hitting the little heart in front of a title or album within Apple Music, and having those thereafter sitting on a playlist?

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“But where do you see the advantage of your system”

I am cataloging my favourite music, movies, books, quotes etc as part of a project to create a ‘commonplace book’ that I can attach to our family tree. I would love to have something similar from my parents, grandparents etc to gain an understanding of their thoughts and interests.

By using Obsidian to gather this information it remains outside of a services that I, or my descendants, may not have access to in the future.

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Interesting, but are you aware, that Apple is providing a function to secure access to your heirs!?

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Yes I am aware, unfortunately I had to use that process recently for my son. It is was not the easiest task to complete.

Apple is only one source of data that I want to capture. Who knows if the services will be around in 10, 20 years. Much better to capture it yourself and control the whole process.

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