Fuji: Solving the Alexa/Apple Music Gaps

If you're like me, you have a wealth of playlists you've built over the years in iTunes/Apple Music. Many of these playlists are older than my kids (my daughter likes to remind me of that). With the advent of Alexa, we went all-in. Alexas are everywhere in our house, ready to play whatever music you desire. The problem is that Apple and Amazon compete in both the music and smart-speaker space, thus providing an underwhelming experience when using both.

My biggest issue is shuffling a large Apple Music playlist on Alexa. Alexa finds the playlist and shuffles the first 10 songs and then shuffles the next 10 songs. When you have a playlist with 808 songs (52+ hours), you want more diversity every time you fire up your favorite playlist. Being the engineer and problem-solver I am, I am trying to bridge that gap with code.

I dusted off a project I started a few months that integrates AWS Lambdas written in Go with Apple Music's API. While I still have a lot work to do (specifically in acquiring an Apple Music User Token for playlist customization), I feel the code is at least ready to start sharing. I placed a couple of the Lambda Go projects on GitHub: one project for storing/retrieving user tokens and another for handling the Alexa intents.

My goal is to finish the code and publish as a reusable skill in Alexa. There's a chance this may fail due to how Apple Music locks in their user tokens but I'm not giving up without a fight! I will build a small Swift app that will hopefully resolve that.

I call this project Fuji, in short because I love those kind of apples and it's fun to say. I welcome any participation and feedback!