macOS Possible to Upload a File to multiple Sites with Automator or Applescript?

[clabella608]

Hi,

I am not a programmer by any means and am just diving into using automaton but I'm wondering if the workflow I have in mind is possible.

I am a music producer and one of the tedious tasks I would like to automate is uploading my beats to a variety of websites (Beatstars, Soundcloud, Youtube, LUM + More)

I realize that since the sites all require different formats for the meta data and some require different file formats, I might not be able to fully automate this process, but hopefully I can at least shave some of the redundancy.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to do this or resources you can point me to it would be beyond appreciated.

 

[casperes1996]

Hi there

Let me start by defining some terminology I’ll use in this response:
An API, Application Programming Interface, is generally speaking a way for your code to interact with another system - such as YouTube, SoundCloud, etc - but also for example something like the macOS GUI system, AppKit, or something else.

Converting file types and dealing with metadata shouldn’t be that big an issue. If your DAW software exports actions to Automator you may in fact be able to just string together different export options into a GUI assisted Automator workflow - just click the options you want. - But that depends on the software used to export your audio tracks/convert the file types and deal with metadata.

As for actually uploading, I’ve checked YouTube and Soundcloud, and both expose public APIs for uploading content. YouTube’s documentation includes a little Python script that demonstrates how to do it - You can adapt that to your needs and run the Python script from Automator, AppleScript, bash, whatever you wind up doing the rest in - not everything needs to be contained to one method. If one thing is easier to do in Automator and another in Python you can usually easily enough call one from the other. Here’s the documentation for YouTube’s API. To find similar resources for the others I recommend just searching “<service-name> upload API” and see what options there are

Upload a Video | YouTube Data API | Google for Developers

developers.google.com

Automating a workflow that includes uploading to so many different and uncontrolled systems (as in not under your direct control), could be very time consuming though. You can’t really generalize the upload methodology from a single platform to another as they’re all very likely to have very different APIs for interacting with them.

File conversion/export options will likely be a rather generic process though, in that once you can do it for a single file type and set of options, you can use pretty much the exact same method for the rest as well

 

[clabella608]

Thank you so much for your quick, but through reply! I'll look further into the YouTube API and see if I can find any information for the other sites

and Hi there

Let me start by defining some terminology I’ll use in this response:
An API, Application Programming Interface, is generally speaking a way for your code to interact with another system - such as YouTube, SoundCloud, etc - but also for example something like the macOS GUI system, AppKit, or something else.

Converting file types and dealing with metadata shouldn’t be that big an issue. If your DAW software exports actions to Automator you may in fact be able to just string together different export options into a GUI assisted Automator workflow - just click the options you want. - But that depends on the software used to export your audio tracks/convert the file types and deal with metadata.

As for actually uploading, I’ve checked YouTube and Soundcloud, and both expose public APIs for uploading content. YouTube’s documentation includes a little Python script that demonstrates how to do it - You can adapt that to your needs and run the Python script from Automator, AppleScript, bash, whatever you wind up doing the rest in - not everything needs to be contained to one method. If one thing is easier to do in Automator and another in Python you can usually easily enough call one from the other. Here’s the documentation for YouTube’s API. To find similar resources for the others I recommend just searching “<service-name> upload API” and see what options there are

Upload a Video | YouTube Data API | Google for Developers

developers.google.com

Automating a workflow that includes uploading to so many different and uncontrolled systems (as in not under your direct control), could be very time consuming though. You can’t really generalize the upload methodology from a single platform to another as they’re all very likely to have very different APIs for interacting with them.

File conversion/export options will likely be a rather generic process though, in that once you can do it for a single file type and set of options, you can use pretty much the exact same method for the rest as well