App ShortBrain

Lightweight MVP in n8n for processing YouTube playlists.

Context: YouTube playlists are a central source of learning and content, but are hard to reuse as a structured knowledge base. ShortBrain automates the conversion into uniform Markdown.

Goals: • Read playlists by ID and capture all videos with core metadata (title, creator, date, tags, description, link) • Build a stable, uniform data schema for automations and knowledge management • Produce an immediately usable Markdown file for Obsidian, Notion, Git repos or a CMS

Implementation: Implemented as an n8n workflow with HTTP requests to the YouTube API, split/merge nodes and several code nodes for data normalization. Built a consistent video structure (source, videoId, title, creator, publishedAt, description, tags, transcript, url). Exports the finished playlist overview as a downloadable shortbrain_playlist.md, prepared for later extensions such as automatic transcription and tag enrichment via LLMs.