Show HN: JQBX – Social Listening Web/Mobile App
jqbx.fm
jqbx.fm
"Listen together"?
On the other hand, if you want a buzzword, "social listening" seems fine because it is only used in a niche that most potential users aren't living in. Sure it might run up against VC conceptions. That points to its real problem: "social listening" is a product category more than an activity.
EDIT: as others have suggested.
One suggestion I have is to have some sort of "Schedule" (or "Happy Hour") function for the rooms. Because the issue I have is when I log on and check out if there are rooms I like are active, most of the time there wont be any DJs in the room. I'm not usually going to hang out in a room by myself (nor I expect other people to wait around for more people to join). So, if we had a function where admins/mods of rooms can send out a message/email to people who have favourited the room to "come back at 8:00PM EST for Happy Hour". And also have schedule messages for people in the room so they know when to come back and there will be more people.
Could definitely be one of the /bot functions too (I saw one of the EDM rooms doing this but it requires some organization by the admin's part, which most people wont bother with).
You actually can do that already- I think I just need to make it more obvious. If you're an admin of a room you can 'broadcast' a message to all the people who have saved your room. The message gets sent via email to those users. Keep the feedback coming though if you have more- just shoot me an email.
Thanks again for creating this program, really hope this stays active for years to come.
Especially...if you get a handful of like minded individuals in a room putting their minds together to make the best set ever.
I usually listen to about 8 hours of music a day on the application and have added around 4,000 songs to my Spotify Library. Most of the songs are songs that I have never heard before.
I also think that tying it to the Spotify Premium subscription is important so that the site can avoid any issues with labels.
In the past there was another site like this called turntable.fm while it was shut down I gained a bunch of friendships, and I could honestly say it is the reason why I became a developer.
In other words its awesome.
This is so easy to whip up your own station with a legit music source. Barrier to entry is much lower than having to figure out how to configure all of the software and connect to the actual stream server. The DJ software had some cool features like fade-in/fade-out, etc. but the music and the DJ's ability to speak to the audience were the important part. The chat element here could replace that. Something like this seems like it could be the next evolution in online radio.
Awesome work!
Mobile is React native, Mac Desktop app is electron + react and website is react. For anyone else wondering.
Are you using a monorepo? The reducers/actions are copied/pasted for each version? Thanks!
If I have a group of 100 people in a similar physical location, I'd like to be able to have 100 speakers in sync. Requiring them all to create an account, let alone purchase Spotify Premium, is unfortunately too much to ask.
If you have some control over the payment model, I'd even be interested in paying an extra fee as a DJ in order to enable more remote speaker connections.
quick edit, if those 100 speakers were simply ONLY broadcasting, you could get licensed as a radio, but if you want the ability to have others select songs, it is pricey
Any chance you'll add the ability to queue up YouTube and/or Soundcloud songs?
Have similar silly restrictions been enforced on JQBX to your knowledge?
Great work! Looking forward to using it!
You can also use it w/ colleagues not in the same office. A lot of people have had success using it in their office if they work remote or have a lot of employees that do.
1. You don't need to know the person in order to listen with them. What you do is you create a room (or join an existing one) and then you can either step up and DJ in the room (with friends or strangers) or you can just do nothing and listen to what people play. You can also make rooms private if you want to do it w/ just people you know.
2. I need camera access so you can upload your avatar. I should probably only request it at the time of upload however- so that's my fault and I'll look into fixing it.
3. I didn't try that Grooveshark feature but it sounds similar. It draws a bit of inspiration from turntable.fm which has been out of business for a couple years.
I have struggled to log in on mobile, it would be great to integrate Facebook’s official log-in API for those of us with FB-based Spotify accounts. Otherwise the process is quite painful.
My only problem is that it’s too fun — I have a hard time using it at work because I get too engaged chatting, saving great tracks and adding my own to a channel.
Next I plan to use this at the gym to keep myself and a few friends workout playlist in sync.
I totally agree that the colors are in a slightly awkward place. The design sort of grew from where I originally started and now I think I need to find a different, maybe less saturated, shade of dark blue to put everywhere.
With that in mind; maybe voting for the next song instead of current?
(in case it's not clear what I mean: IIRC, last time I checked, if you had multiple DJs only the songs from the first DJ would play, followed by all the songs from the second one and so on)
A quick hack would be to make your Queue playlist collaborative and then multiple people could update it- but that may not be exactly what you're looking for either.
For now I'll check JQBX again, because last time I was so focused on finding a collaborative queue app for my workplace that I hadn't stopped to see its public rooms.
A quick fix (if you run OSX) is to download the Mac App and then direct your Spotify App to your Sonos speaker. Then it will work as expected. For now thats the only way to hook them up w/o a wire.