21 years later, it's Automator's time to finally shine.

I remember Steve Jobs introducing “Automator” as part of Mac OS X Tiger in 2005. At the end of his keynote, he demoed the app that would let you automate any mundane task on your Mac.

The trouble is, most people, myself included, found limited use for it. And it sat unnoticed on the vast majority of machines it came installed on for two decades.

Case in point: How long have you had a Mac? Have you ever used the Automator App? Did you even know you had it?

But today?

Automator apps are incredible for an entirely new category of AI-generated personal apps. I’ll work you through several that I’ve made over the next weeks, but here’s one that appeals to the audio nerd in me.

If you’re not an audio person, you probably don’t know that there are loudness standards: How loud should dialog be for a Netflix show so all shows sound the same? What’s the target average loudness for a YouTube video? For a social media video, for a podcast?

Audio people have these standards memorized. I know that podcasts are -16 on the loudness scale, YouTube is -14, Apple’s web content is -18, and TV/broadcast is -23 LUFS. That’s a lot to keep track of! And non-audio people have no idea what any of this means. Popular apps like Final Cut Pro don’t help you achieve this at ALL. So most people are just guessing with their audio most of the time, which is another word for failing at it.

DaVinci Resolve can automatically optimize exports for common loudness standards, but even that isn’t as useful or as powerful as what I’ve built. In the past, if audio people wanted to optimize files themselves, they’d use something like iZotope RX, load a file in, apply the loudness control plugin, and export the audio. Easy enough, but time consuming at scale, and RX isn’t cheap.

So I built an automator app that uses FFMPEG to scan my video files and automatically adjust the loudness to whatever I want, and it works in bulk easily. I just drag the video I want processed onto my automator app, or an entire folder, and it goes through like magic.

As a bonus: My custom content creation and publishing platform is where I make and stage all my content. And the LinkedIn API has a limit for some accounts of 200 MB. So I made my automator app also compress my video to under 200 MB while it’s optimizing the loudness. So I can simply run every video I ever produce through this app, knowing that it will all be up to spec, optimize my database storage, and play nice with every API.

If you haven’t given Automator a look, you might find some incredible new uses for it with AI.

Remember: Just because everyone around you is using AI in the same way, that doesn’t mean there aren’t entire categories of uses of AI that very few people are talking about. Go forth and discover!

If there’s enough interest, I might make a community around some of these ideas and give away some of my software tools, but that part’s on you!