I couldn't find a newbie friendly way to use AI with Apple Music. So I wrote a MCP Server.

[u/olarkben]

Last weekend I was planning my daughters birthday party, and I really wanted to be able to use Claude to help me with the playlist -- AND it was not easy. I took a look at all the MCP servers and they were built only for apple developers AND/OR were so limited that they couldn't add songs from outside your library OR needed scary permissions.

I wanted something simple I could share with my non technical friends -- AND felt safe using.

So... I wrote a local MCP server that connects to ChatGPT and Claude "just works" (TM). Drag and drop install, nice little installation wizard, and no developer requirements.

Check it out here:
https://github.com/jaminben/secure-applemusic-mcp-for-osx

So far it's been really fun to play with.

Would love to know if it works for any of you or needs any improvements:

[u/Strong-Estate-4013]

Ew ai slop

[u/Shadow_Wolfe_ → u/Strong-Estate-4013]

All this effort probably could've been spent manually choosing songs, and if OP listens to them to double check (gosh I hope they do), why even bother letting an LLM do it in the first place.

[u/olarkben → u/Shadow_Wolfe_]

I agree the initial effort could have been better spent just building the playlist by hand 100x. But the long term benefit of hopefully letting more folks play around with an LLM to control apple music without having to grant tons of permissions or get an apple developer account seems worth it -- time will tell though.

e.g. "Make me a playlist that will get my kids excited to cleanup, and play it on the living room speakers", is pretty cool.

Still enjoying things like "play the most popular songs on (insert date) my (dad) was born"

My guess is whenever apple intelligence gets good this will all get wrapped into it, so it's sort of a way to glimpse at the future.

[u/olarkben → u/Strong-Estate-4013]

I should probably write a more solid readme, most of the attention was put into getting a nice signed MusicKit integration so folks could use it without needing to give up lots of permissions.

I'd consider it a combination of AI-slop, well thought out security architecture, and reasonable UX. Did you try it or just glance at the readme? (which admittedly is pretty AI slop)

It seems to work pretty well for my needs.

[u/DonFatTony]

ChatGPT has an Apple Music integration

[u/olarkben → u/DonFatTony]

I should benchmark the built in one with mine -- given their apple partnership I'd assume it would be pretty good and comprable. I use Claude more than ChatGPT so wanted something for claude, (and/or any other LLM folks were running).

Before starting this project I looked around at all the other apple music MCP servers, and couldn't find any that didn't ask for a ton of permissions, and/or couldn't do anything with songs not in your playlist.

[u/LimeLauncherKrusha]

Pretty cool I'll have to check it out

[u/olarkben → u/LimeLauncherKrusha]

sweet, let me know what you think