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Question of the week: What was the most clever way you’ve ever used an Apple product to solve a problem? (self.apple_enthusiast)

submitted 1 year ago by MichelleG to c/apple_enthusiast

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Hello everyone. With more than 15k subscribers, I'm sure the Apple community has some great experiences to share with others. My question this week is, "What was the most clever way you’ve ever used an Apple product to solve a problem?"

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[–] merikus 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

About ten years ago a dear friend and I started a community radio station. In order to make our FCC license more competitive, we started internet streaming pretty early on.

We had great community buy-in, but we needed to broadcast 24/7 and decided to record and rebroadcast live shows.

We had no money, just a MacMini. So we had to do everything with things that came with MacOS or were free or near free.

We ended up creating a pretty impressive interlinking set of AppleScripts, Automator apps, and iTunes Smart Playlists, all driven by Calendar alarms. Calendar alarms would start recordings, which would use the magic import to iTunes folder to get it into iTunes. This would then move into a smart playlist that was set to look for certain tags and only have the most recent audio file with those tags in it.

When a rebroadcast would come up, it was pretty simple. A calendar alarm would trigger an AppleScript that triggered one of these Smart Playlists.

It all worked well for a long time. Ultimately we got our FCC license, and donations allowed us to improve our IT. But this station ran on iTunes, AudioHijack, AppleScript, Automator, and Calendar alarms for years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I used to do a show on a tiny internet station that my friend ran. Once a week for two hours.

Did the whole thing from my iPad. Well, two actually. A 7th gen for running DJay and all the assorted apps I needed to make it work, then a 4th gen Mini for the microphone and channel faders. My mic was a Blue Yeti hooked up through a generic powered USB hub. The whole endeavour used 6 or 7 apps, all working in conjunction, and all had to be opened in a specific order or something might crash.

It was a huge pain in the arse, but so satisfying to get it working.

Ultimately, I could have replaced all of that with Mixxx for free on my ancient MacBook, but where would the fun have been in that? Also, the fan on my Mac would have sounded like a jet engine idling in the background.