Generating Links for Multiple Music Streaming Services with MusicLink
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Generating Links for Multiple Music Streaming Services with MusicLink
Ever since I switched to Spotify late last year, one thing that’s increasingly annoyed me has been the lack of an easy way to share links to songs and albums with my friends. You see, in my group of close friends, I’m the only brave soul who’s decided to give Spotify a try in 2021; everyone else is still doing just fine in the comfort of Apple Music and its native integrations on Apple platforms. This has created an interesting conundrum: as the self-proclaimed guy in charge of discovering new music releases in our group thread, how am I supposed to quickly share links to interesting songs with my fellow Apple Music subscribers if I’m using Spotify instead? Clearly, if you know me, you can imagine that the long-term solution to this can’t be “just search Apple Music and copy those links manually”. I’m not an animal. And this is where MusicLink comes in.
First, let’s take a step back. One of the (many) features of MusicBot, my all-in-one Apple Music assistant built with Shortcuts, is the ability to take a song from Apple Music and generate links for the same song on other streaming services. I added that functionality a couple years ago using a service called SongLink, which provides a free API that works well in Shortcuts. Since the original release of MusicBot, SongLink changed its name to Odesli, but the core functionality of the service is still the same and the API endpoints haven’t changed either. So when I started looking at a way to automate the process of sharing Apple Music links with my friends, I thought I could just rip the existing Odesli integration out of MusicBot and call it a day. As it turns out, it wasn’t that simple.