Retrieve Live NPR Program Information with Siri Shortcuts

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Retrieve Live NPR Program Information with Siri Shortcuts

• GitHub Issue
• Automation April Winning Shortcuts (Tilde)
• Introducing the 2022 Automation April Shortcuts Contest Winners
• What's on KUTX? by Jack Wellborn
• GitHub - jefforulez/pyportal-npr: Use an Adafruit PyPortal to show what’s currently playing on WBGO, or other NPR stations.
• 5387648fe1c8335046a1d4b4
• Broadcasts App
• What's on KBIA?
• What's on KBIA? Shortcut

This past month, MacStories hosted a community Siri Shortcuts contest called Automation April. One of its winners - a shortcut called "What's on KUTX?" credited to Jack Wellborn - caught my eye as a lifelong dependent upon National Public Radio. Via John Voorhees' comment:

The solution Wellborn came up with is ingenious. It turns out that KUTX uses a web API that can return information about the currently playing track. The API is used to drive an ‘On Now’ widget on the station’s website, but Wellborn discovered that they could query the API and get the track information back as JSON. So, they built a shortcut that queries the API when run, returning the info about the currently-playing song.

I began playing around with the NPR API Jack used and discovered quite accidentally that their shortcut could be modified to display current program information for those NPR stations that are not music-oriented, like mine.