by Jason Snell
Automating time tracking via Audio Hijack 4
Federico Viticci uses Audio Hijack 4 scripting to connect his recording sessions to his time tracking:
That got me thinking: when I start recording a show, I could run a script that fires off a shortcut that contains a Timery action to start time tracking. I don’t want to manually tell Shortcuts which podcast I’m recording, but Audio Hijack can help here as well: the app can pass the name of the session that just started to Shortcuts. If I named my Audio Hijack sessions with the same name I use for each podcast project in Timery, does that mean I could invoke one shortcut that knew exactly what podcast I started recording?
Though scripting Audio Hijack does require some rudimentary JavaScript, its ability to pass data to Shortcuts lowers the bar for ease of use considerably. (I’m a fan of Federico’s approach of passing a JSON dictionary to Shortcuts; it allows a single shortcut to flexibly respond to different kinds of input rather than requiring a whole bunch of different shortcuts to perform slightly different tasks.)