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Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with Fair Queueing (jukeboxhq.com)

122 points by skeptrune ↗ HN
Hey HN,

I built Jukebox because I got frustrated with group music apps and Spotify’s limitations (not everyone has Spotify, and collaborative playlists are still too easily dominated by one person). Jukebox is a web app that lets you create a group queue—anyone can join via link, add YouTube songs, and the system automatically rotates songs so everyone gets a fair turn (no more playlist hogs).

Web-based, no accounts, no installs.

Drop in a YouTube link or search and add music instantly.

Songs rotate in round-robin order (so even if one person adds ten songs, nobody else is skipped).

Entirely open source (MIT), self-hostable with Docker, privacy-friendly.

Live demo: https://jukeboxhq.com

Code: https://github.com/skeptrunedev/jukebox

I made this as a stress-relief project while pivoting my actual startup (Trieve) and used it to practice UI/UX (neo-brutalist design, drag-and-drop), plus experiment with AI pair coding.

Would love your feedback or feature ideas!

20 comments

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4b11b4
dope. If I hit next does it go next on the other people's players?
noleary
I love that this was a "stress-relief project."
awaseem
Love this! More open source products for the better!
jp57
One thing I think is interesting is that many people value fairness, but people also have very different ideas of what is fair.

For example, I think quite a lot of people think first-come-first-served is fair, and jumping the queue is unfair. But that doesn't seem to be the notion of fairness employed here.

andelink
Cool project! I have never been very satisfied with the existing services for collaborating on playlists.

I think the experience could be improved if you branched beyond YouTube for the media. I search "jim-e stack" and see multiple non-song videos (in fact 3/4 are not songs). One idea might be to use a service like https://odesli.co (formerly song.link) to filter to real music tracks people are familiar with on their streaming platforms. Their API returns links to Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, etc for a given music entity (e.g. song, album). Furthermore, integrating with Odesli would offer a path towards allowing users to drop Spotify / Apple Music URLs directly from their respective apps into the jukebox, which I think would be my ideal experience.

My $0.02. Thanks for sharing!

bahrtw
Superfun! Would be cool if you could experience the Jukebox itself, with a playlist from visitors? Then you directly have playable songs? :)
Unai
There's another "Jukebox" [1] that's been doing apparently the same thing for many years, in there a connection there, or just the same name (and function)?

[1] https://jukebox.today/

corny
This is great. One little thing, after the last song in the playlist is over, it would be nice if the state remained in play mode so that when another song is added to the queue the new song would play right away.

Also, I've been wanting something just like this but that would also play the video as well as audio.

cdurth
Ripping the video to s3, naughty naughty. Be expecting your YouTube API key to be revoked and DMCA.
foresto
Neat.

Any plans to support playback as a shoutcast stream, so folks can listen with their usual sound systems instead of a web browser?

extraduder_ire
You should probably put the MIT license you're using into a license.txt file in the repo. I don't see it anywhere outside of mention in the readme.
JodieBenitez
Very cool application, nice UI too. No accounts is great. Youtube is obviously a must, but having the possibility to add a link to a file would be nice.