DJ to Your Friends With This Spotify-Related App
While the mixtape is long gone, you can still look for a new way to share your latest mix over the weekend with colleagues or stay in touch with friends across the country while playing along to your favorite songs. You can now use JQBX to share playlists, vote for songs, and broadcast your musical taste to everyone with a Spotify account.
How to become a DJ
JQBX is ad-free, but requires you (and every other user) to have a Spotify Premium account. It is available for iOS, Android, macOS, and as a web app at jqbx.fm. The app offers you a list of user-created public and private rooms, each with one or more DJs playing multiple tracks. You can search, save and create public or password protected rooms. To become a DJ, just join the room, click “Be a DJ” and place the tracks on your DJ turn. Don’t worry about overflow; you can set a limit on the number of DJs.
Each DJ room has a chat room where users can interact and a thumbs up / thumbs down rating system for each song. You can save songs played by other DJs to a new Spotify playlist for later listening, and view the room’s track history (which you can export). Users can volunteer to become DJs, and if there are multiple DJs, JQBX will switch between users by playing one song from their playlist.
Use Spotify to Control Everything
Right now, JQBX’s method for adding songs to your queue is a bit limited (it can’t display your recently played tracks from Spotify, for example). In the queue, you can add, rearrange and delete any of your songs. You can also manage your queued and tagged songs on Spotify, where JQBX will automatically create a tagged and queued playlist that you can edit at your leisure. Your Spotify changes are automatically reflected in the JQBX app (click sync if you don’t see your changes).
Lifehacker staff shared tunes in our own JQBX room last week and we love it. If you would like to join us, we will play completely and completely workable tunes that we know and love, and we invite you to listen and contribute your own tunes. Search JQBX for Lifehacker Rocks to find that we’ve been jamming all week.