Feature · Oct 2026
I had a drive through the mountains coming up.
No signal. But I still wanted my favorite station along for the ride.
Read the transcript
I had a drive through the mountains coming up. No signal. But I still wanted my favorite station along for the ride.
iHeartRadio, Freeform Radio, last 7 days: 2,250 songs played last week. 483 different songs. 270 artists. Turns out iHeartRadio publishes everything a station plays.
For me, curation beats the algorithm for variety and discovery. Music services are overtuned or undertuned to my tastes.
So I asked AI to help me repurpose it. Output: a short Python script. No dependencies.
250 songs, in play order. Hours of blissful driving. Order preserved to respect station curation.
Then my iPhone did the rest. A five-step Shortcut finds each song in Apple Music and builds the playlist.
[A real screen recording at 8× speed: songs fill the playlist one by one while a notification counts them off.]
Downloaded before we left. No signal needed.
$0 spent. 10 minutes to build. Open data, a little AI, an iPhone, and no algorithms.
Curated by Freeform Radio.
Workings. Odds and ends from a lifelong tinkerer. workings.blog
Why curation
Music in the background is a constant part of my day, whether I'm working, cooking, or driving: coffee shop-style for early AM, rock and roll during the workday, and maybe kid-friendly pop at night.
For every mood, I have my go-to streaming stations. Nothing beats curated radio for the right mix of variety and spontaneity. I've yet to find perfect playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, and frankly I feel like the AI features in these products are only making them over-tune or under-tune to my needs.
Streaming solves my background music problem for most of the day, but there's a little wrinkle at drive time. I live in a place with no great local radio and spotty cell service.
- Early AMCoffee shop-style
- WorkdayRock and roll
- NightKid-friendly pop
What the station data made possible
What I needed was a "download" of my favorite stations that would feel different every time I got in the car. I figured if I could get the playlists, I could import them into Apple Music and download the songs for offline use. So I asked Claude to take the wheel.
It quickly found that Freeform Radio (a great spectrum-of-rock station from iHeartRadio) publishes thousands of its most recently played songs. It proposed uploading the list to one of a few online services that would match the songs and send them to Apple Music.
This sounded good, but not great. I'd have to re-upload the list every time it changed, and I didn't want to add another vendor if I didn't need to. I prefer clean solutions that use as much of what I already have as possible.
How it works
On a hunch, I asked whether iOS Shortcuts could manage playlists. It went back to the drawing board, and I was pleasantly surprised: Shortcuts could look up songs and add them to a playlist.
Claude wrote a short script to pull the station's list, then gave me the steps for the Shortcut. After a couple rounds of tweaks and tests, I was looking at a crisp new playlist in Apple Music: the last 250 songs played on Freeform. I hit download, and away I went without fear of interrupted musical enjoyment.
- Get Clipboard
- Split Text
- Repeat with Each
- Search iTunes Store
- Add to Playlist
What I learned
- Don't take the first solution AI proposes. Asking it to dig a little deeper often yields better results.
- Claude (and other AI build tools) are really good at plumbing jobs like this. They can find data sources you didn't even know existed.
- Shortcuts is a powerful tool. While it's obviously great for automating apps on the phone, it also has the ability to run programming scripts, pull in data from the web, and transform it in a way that other apps can consume.
Try it with your station
With the AI coder of your choice, ask it to help you determine whether your favorite station makes its playlist available. Tell it you'd like to build an iOS Shortcut (or Android equivalent if that's your jam) that pulls the most recent songs, matches against the iTunes library, and builds a new playlist with the results. Note that as of this writing it can only create new playlists, so you'll need to delete the existing one with each run.
Here's the prompt I started with. Swap in your station.
I'd like your help building playlists for [Apple Music or Spotify] based on my preferences. I'm not finding any tools online that I like, and I don't like the AI built into the music apps. There are radio stations I like, and I'd like you to try to pull their playlists. The first one I'd like to target is [YOUR STATION], and the goal is to create a playlist I can import, listen to and download while I'm traveling without internet access.
If it gets stuck, nudge it:
Could iOS Shortcuts create the playlist for me?