From YouTube to Huffduffer with Workflow

Workflow has already become an incredibly useful iOS tool. It’s letting me do things on my iPhone and iPad that I previously could only do on my Mac.

For years, I’ve stripped the audio from talks uploaded to YouTube and listened to them in my podcast client via Huffduffer.

In the past, seeing a link to something while on the go means having to send the URL to Instapaper and having to remember to rip the audio and upload the file to Dropbox or S3 when I return to my Mac.

I figured this could all be done in Workflow, but struggled to make it work. I asked, and the Internet answered.

As you might imagine, Federico saved the day:

The workflow takes a YouTube URL, grabs the video, converts it to MP3, uploads it to Dropbox and then passes the Dropbox URL to Huffduffer’s webpage.

It’s not perfect — it hangs on some videos — but overall, it’s great for most of what I’ve thrown at it in testing.

More importantly, I’m having lots of issues with the link to the Dropbox-stored file. Dropbox re-directs the link the app gives back and Huffduffer can’t seem to always follow the redirection.

Since I have an S3 account, I tweaked the workflow to use the iOS document picker interface. This lets me upload the file to my S3 bucket with Transmit.

Unfortunately, Workflow can’t fetch the S3 URL, so after uploading the file, I’m manually opening Transmit, getting the URL of my file, opening it in Safari and firing this workflow as an extension.

UPDATE: I’ve got a Dropbox workaround in place now.

This isn’t perfect, and it’s a few more steps than the workflow Federico suggested, but I’m getting a much more consistent experience when trying to download the file in Overcast, which is the point of all of this.

I need a nap.