Case Study: How I Cut Media Production Time by 34% With Automation

The Challenge: Scaling Quality Personalized Music

As the founder of Music Made Pro, I'm constantly looking for ways to optimize our production workflow. When you're personalizing hundreds of songs each month, even small efficiency gains translate to substantial time and cost savings. Our recent automation project not only decreased production time by 34% but also improved the quality of our deliverables by reducing revisions by 14%. Just as important, our Airtable and Make.com workflow integration eliminated hours of administrative overhead, allowing our team to focus on creative work instead of status updates and client communications.

When we started Music Made Pro in 2023, AI vocals had just reached usable quality. We saw an opportunity to offer personalized songs by swapping lyrics while maintaining the original artist's voice. As demand grew, we faced a critical bottleneck: manual processing of each lyric swap was time-consuming and inconsistent.

Our customers expect quick turnarounds (we promise delivery in 3 business days) and exceptional quality. Meeting these expectations while scaling the business required a technical solution.

The Technical Approach: Developing an Inpainting Automation Script

After analyzing our workflow, I identified that the most time-consuming part was interacting with Udio's interface for each segment that needed modification. For context, Udio is one of the tools we use for voice cloning and audio generation. The process involved uploading audio segments, setting selection regions, entering new lyrics, waiting for generation to complete, and then downloading and evaluating the results.

To address this, I developed a Python automation framework that leverages Playwright to programmatically interact with Udio's interface. The solution consists of several interconnected modules that handle different aspects of the automation process.

Streamlining Administration: Our Airtable and Make.com Integration

While the Python automation script dramatically reduced the time required for audio processing, we still faced administrative challenges tracking order status, managing client communications, and coordinating our production team. This is where Airtable and Make.com (formerly Integromat) became essential to our operation.

We built a comprehensive Airtable base that serves as our centralized production management system. It tracks every order from intake to delivery, storing critical metadata like deadlines, client requirements, file locations, and production status. Rather than having our team manually update statuses and send emails, we use Make.com to automate these processes.

Our Make.com blueprints monitor our Airtable database for status changes and automatically trigger appropriate actions. For example, when a producer marks an order as "Ready for Delivery," Make.com automatically emails the client with their personalized song links and a feedback form. If a client requests revisions, Make.com immediately notifies the assigned producer and updates our tracking database.

This automation eliminated approximately 5-7 minutes of administrative work per order. With hundreds of orders per month, this saves our team 20-30 hours of admin time that can now be redirected to creative production. Just as importantly, it ensures consistent client communication and eliminates the risk of missed notifications or delayed responses.

Key Components of the Automation Solution

1. Transcript Analysis and Segmentation

The first component analyzes the original song transcript alongside the new lyrics to identify which segments need modification. The system compares original and new transcripts, creates "theta windows" that include context before and after the modified text, and calculates precise timing information for each segment.

This was crucial for ensuring that only the necessary parts of the song were modified, preserving the original artist's performance as much as possible. The system also adds a small buffer (5%) on each side of the modification to prevent cutting off words or creating unnatural transitions.

2. Automated Browser Interaction

The core automation handles browser interaction using Playwright, which:

• Navigates to Udio and uploads audio segments
• Precisely positions selection handles based on calculated percentages
• Enters the new lyrics with proper formatting
• Initiates generation and handles waiting periods
• Downloads the generated audio files
• Manages error handling and recovery

One of the most challenging aspects was making the automation robust against UI changes and network delays. I implemented random delays between actions to simulate human behavior and added comprehensive error handling to ensure the system could recover from unexpected situations.

3. A Small Glimpse at the Code

Here's a small sample that shows how the system sets the region selection based on calculated percentages:

async def set_region_selection(self):
    # Add 5% buffer to both sides of the selection
    start_pct = max(0, (self.config.target_start_pct - 5) / 100)
    end_pct = min(1, (self.config.target_end_pct + 5) / 100)

    # Locate the waveform and get its dimensions
    wave_form = self.page.locator("#waveform").first
    await wave_form.wait_for(state="visible", timeout=10000)
    wave_box = await wave_form.bounding_box()

    # Position the handles with human-like mouse movements
    # ... additional code for precise positioning ...

4. Airtable Status Management

Our Airtable base includes interconnected tables for Orders, Team Members, and Client Submissions, with custom views for different production stages. Each order record contains 30+ fields tracking everything from payment details to delivery links, all accessible through our custom Airtable interfaces.

We've created specialized forms that allow producers and clients to update order statuses without needing direct access to the database. When a status changes, Make.com's monitoring scripts trigger appropriate automation workflows based on the specific status update.

The Results: Measurable Improvements in Efficiency and Quality

After implementing the automation script, we observed several significant improvements:

• 34% reduction in production time per song, allowing us to process more orders with the same team
• 14% decrease in revision requests from customers, indicating improved quality
• 50+ hours monthly saved in administrative work through our Airtable and Make.com integration
• More consistent results across different songs and vocal styles
• Better melody adherence due to the shift from extensions to inpainting techniques
• 100% consistent client communication with zero missed notifications
• Reduced mental fatigue for our production team, who can now focus on creative aspects rather than repetitive tasks

The improvement in melody adherence was particularly noteworthy. Before the automation, we often used extension techniques to save time, which sometimes resulted in melodies that didn't perfectly match the original. With inpainting now being less time-consuming thanks to automation, we can use this superior technique for more cases, leading to better musical results.

The Airtable and Make.com integration has been equally transformative for our business operations. Before implementation, we had no standardized way to track order progress, leading to occasional dropped communications and delayed responses. Now, our entire workflow is systematized, with automatic status updates and communications that keep both our team and clients informed at every step.

Key Lessons: AI Implementation Is About Augmentation, Not Replacement

This project reinforced a core principle that guides my approach to AI implementation: the goal is to reduce human work that can be reduced—not to replace human creativity and judgment entirely.

Could we have built a fully automated solution without any human involvement? Technically, yes. But it would either generate inferior results or require users to make corrections themselves, defeating the purpose of our service. Instead, our approach strategically automates the repetitive, time-consuming parts of the process while preserving human oversight for the aspects that require musical judgment and creativity.

The automation never nails every single lyric replacement perfectly, but it doesn't need to. By handling the bulk of the technical work automatically, our human producers can focus their expertise on fine-tuning and perfecting the final product—delivering higher quality results in less time.

Similarly, our Airtable and Make.com system doesn't make creative decisions, but it does remove the friction of routine communications and status updates. This lets our team concentrate on what they do best while ensuring clients always stay informed.

Implications for Your Business

This case study demonstrates several principles that apply across industries:

• Identify repetitive processes that consume disproportionate time relative to their creative value
• Develop targeted automation for these specific bottlenecks rather than trying to automate everything
• Build integrated systems that connect your production tools with your client communication channels
• Measure results objectively to ensure your automation is actually improving efficiency and quality
• Preserve human creativity for the aspects where it adds the most value
• Iterate and refine your automation based on real-world usage and feedback

Whether you're in e-commerce, content creation, marketing, or any other field, the same principles apply: identify your workflow bottlenecks, develop targeted technical solutions, and measure the impact on both efficiency and quality.

Next Steps: Continuous Improvement

While the current automation has already delivered significant improvements, we're continuing to refine and expand it. Future enhancements include:

• Implementing machine learning to predict which inpainting version will sound better based on historical data
• Adding automated quality checks to identify potential issues before human review
• Expanding the automation to other tools in our production pipeline
• Developing a dashboard to track efficiency metrics and identify further optimization opportunities
• Creating a custom client portal that integrates directly with our Airtable system
• Building additional Make.com workflows to automate our financial reporting and team payouts

Each of these improvements represents an opportunity to further enhance both efficiency and quality—continuing the virtuous cycle of optimization that drives our business forward.

Could Your Workflow Benefit from Similar Optimization?

If you're facing workflow challenges in your business—whether related to content creation, digital marketing, e-commerce, or any other area—I'd love to help you identify opportunities for technical optimization that could deliver similar efficiency and quality improvements.

Through MuseMouth, I work with forward-thinking professionals to implement data-driven optimization, streamline workflows, and effectively integrate AI into existing business processes—always with a focus on measurable results and ROI.