Apple Announces the 2021 Apple Music Awards

The Apple Music Awards are back, honoring artists in several categories. This is the third year Apple has held the awards and, as was the case the past two years, honors were bestowed for Global Artist of the Year, Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, Top Song of the Year, and Top Album of the Year. This year, however, the company also named five Regional Artists of the Year for Africa, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia:

“The past 12 months have proved to be a remarkable year for music, and we’re thrilled to honor the artists who are shaping culture and connecting with fans around the world on Apple Music,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats. “This year we’re also recognizing more regional artists, showing the world the impact of extraordinary talented musicians who are making waves globally.”

Each Apple Music Award is commemorated with a unique award featuring a 12-inch silicon wafer suspended between a sheet of glass and anodized aluminum. Similar to last year, Apple is celebrating the annual awards with “interviews, original content, and more” on Apple Music and the Apple TV app beginning December 7th.

Olivia Rodrigo was honored with three awards this year.

Olivia Rodrigo was honored with three awards this year.

The 2021 Apple Music Awards winners are:

Wizkid was among five Regional Artists of the Year chosen by Apple this year.

Wizkid was among five Regional Artists of the Year chosen by Apple this year.

It’s not surprising that Olivia Rodrigo won multiple awards this year. Few artists have had the immediate impact on music streaming services that Rodrigo has. It’s also good to see Apple add regional Artists of the Year for the first time. Music is a global media force, but that hasn’t diminished the importance and impact of the medium on a regional level. I hope Apple expands the regional Artist of the Year category to other countries and regions in the future.

Also, it will be interesting to see what Apple has in store beginning December 7th. Events like the Apple Music Awards are the sort of opportunity for integration across multiple Apple services that the company hasn’t done a lot of to date. I’d love to see interviews, live performances, music video collections, playlists, album commentaries by the winners, and podcasts brought together in a unified package that makes it easy to access all related content.

Jason Tate’s Dedicated Now Playing Mini-Computer→

Source: Chorus.fm.

Source: Chorus.fm.

As you can imagine, Jason Tate, Chorus.fm’s founder, listens to a lot of music. He wanted a dedicated device that displays the music he listens to throughout the day, so as a weekend project, he built what he wanted:

A small Raspberry Pi powered screen that displays what I am currently listening to. It sits, unassuming, next to my computer on the desk. When no music is playing it displays my most listened to albums from the past week, as well as some my music listening stats pulled from Last.fm.

The device consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero WH, a 4” screen, a 3D-printed enclosure, and other parts. The Pi runs Linux, serving a purpose-built website hosted on a Chorus.fm server that periodically polls the Last.fm API to fetch the currently playing song. The Now Playing screen’s design looks fantastic and is inspired by Marvis Pro, an Apple Music client for the iPhone and iPad that I wrote about last week in MacStories Weekly. If nothing is playing, the device shows Tate’s Last.fm listening stats and top albums played during the past week.

A nice final touch is that Tate’s creation can be controlled entirely with a shortcut that run shell scripts on the Raspberry Pi, allowing it to be shut down, rebooted, and refreshed, or the screen to be turned on and off separately.

I love projects like this and immediately began thinking of ways it could be extended using Apple’s MusicKit framework. Tate is using the device he built on his desk, but the size would work in a lot of environments like a kitchen countertop or bedside table. With the cold weather descending on Chicago, this seems like the perfect sort of project to dig into after the holidays. If you’re interested in learning more and building your own, Jason Tate’s story includes everything you’ll need.

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Create, Edit, and Collaborate on Documents on Your Desktop and Mobile Devices with Your Free Office Suite by ONLYOFFICE [Sponsor]

ONLYOFFICE is the premier productivity suite for desktop and mobile that’s also open-source and free. The suite is a powerful choice for anyone who works across multiple devices, including Apple hardware and Windows and Linux devices. That means whatever device or system you’re using, you’ve got ONLYOFFICE close at hand to help you get things done. ONLYOFFICE is fully-compatible with M1 Macs too, where it’s blazingly fast.

ONLYOFFICE offers a complete set of word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools that support all the file formats you’ll need, including DOCX, ODT, XLSX, ODS, CSV, PPTX, ODP, and more. What’s more, with its tabbed interface, ONLYOFFICE lets you work efficiently with multiple file types at one time. The suite also features a deep set of sophisticated tools for editing and formatting your documents, so your work always looks fantastic.

ONLYOFFICE is security and privacy-minded too. The suite includes password protection, digital signature support, watermarking, and more. They’re features that provide the peace of mind that your data is yours and only shared by you when and how you choose.

Collaboration and extensibility are core to ONLYOFFICE. The suite features a rich ecosystem of third-party plugins that support other services like Google Translate, YouTube, DocuSign, cloud storage providers, WordPress, and many more. With ONLYOFFICE Workspace, Nexcloud, ownCloud, or Seafile, you can collaborate with your colleagues on documents too, editing, commenting, and reviewing together in real-time.

If you haven’t checked out ONLYOFFICE yet, now is the time to do so. Visit ONLYOFFICE’s website today to learn more about how you can integrate this powerful and free suite of open-source applications into your workflow.

Our thanks to ONLYOFFICE for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Shortcuts, Pixelmator Pro, the Apple Watch, and Special Deals on MacStories Pixel Icons

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

AppStories

Unwind

MacStories Shortcuts Icons and Perspective Icons: 40% Off from Black Friday to Cyber Monday

MacStories Shortcuts Icons and Perspective Icons are 40% off for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

MacStories Shortcuts Icons and Perspective Icons are 40% off for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are upon us, and we’ve prepared something truly special to celebrate the occasion at MacStories: starting today through Monday, November 29, MacStories Shortcuts Icons and Perspective Icons are available at 40% off their regular price.

To purchase MacStories Shortcuts Icons at $17.99 rather than the usual $29.99, click the ‘Buy’ button below:

To purchase our Perspective Icons at $14.99 rather than the usual $24.99, click the ‘Buy’ button below:

All sales are final. You can read our license and terms of use here and here.

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Exporting Links from Safari Reading List via Shortcuts for Mac

Reading List Exporter.

Reading List Exporter.

A few weeks ago in the second lesson of the Automation Academy for Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members, I wrote about how I’ve been using Reminders as a read-later app in addition to traditional task management. The full details are in the story, but to sum up: using a combination of shortcuts based on Apple’s native actions, I can use Reminders to choose between long and short stories whenever I’m in the mood to read something. I love this setup, and I’ve been using it for nearly three months now.

Earlier this week, however, I realized I still hadn’t re-imported old articles from Safari Reading List – my previous read-later tool – into Reminders. That immediately posed an interesting challenge. Sure, I could manually re-save each article from Safari Reading List to Reminders, but that sounded like a chore. Other read-later apps such as Reeder and GoodLinks have long offered Shortcuts actions to fetch links from their databases and process them in Shortcuts however you see fit; Reading List, like other Apple apps, doesn’t support any actions to get the URLs you previously saved. And that’s when I had an idea.

Now that it’s available on macOS, Shortcuts can get access to application support files that are kept private and hidden from users on iOS and iPadOS. More specifically, I remembered that Safari for Mac has long stored its bookmarks and Reading List items in a file called Bookmarks.plist, which folks have been able to read via AppleScript for years. Under the hood, a .plist file is nothing but a fancy dictionary, and we know that Shortcuts has excellent support for parsing dictionaries and extracting data from them.

The plan was simple, and I knew what to do.

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Apple Publishes Annual Holiday Ad: Saving Simon

Every year, Apple publishes a heartwarming holiday ad that shows off its products in some way. This year, Saving Simon, directed by Jason Reitman, shows off the iPhone 13 Pro, which was used to film the three-minute spot.

Saving Simon tells the story of a small snowman that a girl saves from destruction in her yard by storing it in her family’s freezer. In the months that follow, the girl checks in on Simon, who lives in the freezer alongside the family’s frozen food.

When the winter comes again, the girl takes Simon back outside to the family’s front yard. I won’t spoil the ending, but it ends with the family coming together to help the girl and her snowman friend.

This Holiday Season, Give the Gift of Club MacStories, and If You’re a Club Member, Get Something Back For Yourself Too

More Club Gift Options Than Ever Before

The holiday season is upon us, and as you shop for gifts for friends and family, we wanted to remind everyone that Club MacStories memberships can be given as gifts all year long. Every tier of the Club extends what we publish at MacStories, which makes it the perfect gift for someone who wants more of the kind of in-depth app, automation, and other coverage you find on the site every day.

This year saw the introduction of Club MacStories+ and Club Premier, which join the original Club MacStories as gift options for this holiday season.

Pick a Plan

As always,Club MacStories delivers weekly and monthly newsletters by email and now, on the web, packed with our favorite apps, themed collections, tips, Shortcuts automations, and more. Club members also receive MacStories Unplugged, our monthly Club-only podcast, plus periodic giveaways, discounts, and downloadable exclusives like our annual iOS and iPadOS and macOS reviews.

Club MacStories+ offers bonus content, a brand new, powerful web app to read Club articles on the web with advanced search and RSS features, exclusive discounts, and a new Discord community.

Club Premier is the ultimate plan that includes all of Club MacStories, Club MacStories+, and the new extended, ad-free AppStories+ podcast in a single package. It is the best value and the easiest way to get access to everything we do. It is, effectively, the MacStories all-access pass.

To learn more about each tier, visit plus.club.

Gift an Annual Plan Through November 30th, and Extend Your Own Membership

This year we’re doing something new too. Gift accounts are available all year long. However, through November 30th, if you’re already a Club member at any tier and purchase an annual membership for someone as a gift, we’ll extend your membership one month.

The process is simple:

  • Purchase an annual Club membership for someone
  • Send us an email at [email protected] to let us know you gifted a membership and include the email address you use to log into the Club

That’s it. We’ll confirm your gift purchase based on your Club email address and extend your membership one month as a thank you from the MacStories team for helping spread the word about Club MacStories.

So, if you have a MacStories reader on your holiday shopping list this season, consider a Club MacStories membership that they can enjoy all year long.

Gift Memberships Are Available at All Tiers

Annual gift memberships can be purchased using the links below:

Annual Club Premier Gift Membership: $120
Annual Club MacStories+ Gift Membership: $100
Annual Club MacStories Gift Membership: $50

We also offer monthly gift memberships too, although they aren’t eligible for the special offer above, which can be purchased here:

Monthly Club Premier Gift Membership: $12
Monthly Club MacStories+ Gift Membership: $10
Monthly Club MacStories Gift Membership: $5

Finally, thanks to all our loyal Club members who have joined since the Club’s debut in 2015. You’re an essential part of what we do here at MacStories, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the Club as much as we enjoy creating its special content for you all year long.

Happy Holidays!

– The MacStories Team