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If you have a great Apple Music playlist for holiday-themed parties but it includes a few tracks that aren’t appropriate for ears of all ages, you don’t have to worry about making your mixes family friendly anymore. Forget about painstaking recreating it yourself using “clean” versions of explicit songs yourself—there’s a Siri Shortcut for that.
This isn’t a functionality Apple has built into their streaming service, although they probably should. Instead, it comes from Reddit user AdTrue6877. Their Siri Shortcut scans all the songs in any Apple Music playlist and creates a new playlist that replaces all explicit songs with their clean versions. It’s the fastest way to create family friendly playlists on Apple Music.
To start, download the Make Clean Playlist shortcut and run it on your phone. The shortcut will automatically show you a pop-up that allows you to scroll and select any of your Apple Music playlists. From there, the shortcut will ask you to name the new playlist and will begin making a clean version. It takes a bit of time, so be patient.
That said, you don’t have to keep staring at the progress bar in the Shortcuts app—open Apple Music and you’ll see the new playlist. Songs will keep appearing on it one-by-one as the shortcut finishes its task. When it’s done, the shortcut will tell you if it couldn’t find clean versions of some songs. Any still-too-saucy songs will be automatically removed from the new playlist.
The shortcut isn’t perfect, so it’s worth checking its work afterward. For example, Green Day has a single track called “Holiday/Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” which combines both of those songs. Clean versions of both songs are available individually, but not in combination. In this case, you’d have to add those tracks back individually yourself.
Using the shortcut, it took me a little under five minutes to convert a playlist containing 70 songs using an iPhone XS Max. It’s possible your results may vary if have a different device and a larger or smaller playlist.
Oh, and in case you want to go the other way and turn your clean radio-friendly playlist into an explicit one, try the shortcut Make Dirty Playlist. It’s by the same Reddit user and it operates via the same logic, with the opposite results.
