Dynamic Playlist

This shortcut makes it easy to quickly get some music playing that you haven't heard in awhile. When you run it, it pulls out all the songs in your phone's music library that meet whatever criteria you specify, then plays them at random. (I never got into streaming music via Spotify, why spend money & precious, precious data to get access to something I already have? Pay money to give up something I already have just so The Algorithm can give me stuff I never actually like? Couldn't be me.)

How to use

Setup

When you downoad the shortcut, you can edit the criteria under the "Find music where" action to be whatever you would like. I like to use the "Comments" field in iTunes to label songs for this purpose, so that I can say "Exclude songs with the "Christmas" or "Instrumental" labels"; but you can use any criteria you prefer. You can also edit the number of days that you'd like to go back.

If you wanted to, you could modify the shortcut to give you a menu when you run it that lets you specify these things every time you run it, but I prefer a one-button experience.

You can also customize it to open up your favorite music player app if you prefer another one over the default.

Using

Just add the shortcut to your home screen and hit it when you want some music. That's it!

How it works

  1. First the shortcut figures out the date that equals 20 days before today.
  2. Then the shortcut finds all the songs on your phone that match the criteria you give it and sorts them at random.
  3. Then it adds the songs to your phone's "Up next" queue and starts playing.
  4. Finally it opens up the Music player so you can control the music.
Download