Gadgetory

the right music can make or break a good party but the idea is spending hours perfectly crafting the nights worth of music is enough to make me not want to throw a party at all Donald bell today I'm going to show you how to get rid of the anxiety of DJing your own party by putting your friends to work the key to this particular method is a free app called jukebox heroes available for both the iphone and for android and in a lot of ways it works just like a regular jukebox you fill it up with music and your guests get to play songs using free credits while I'm waiting for my guests to arrive i'm going to set up my jukebox which in this case is my phone you get started i'm going to launch the app then tap create your jukebox now you have to sign up for a free account using either facebook or your email address and then it's time to give your jukebox a name that your guests are going to recognize and a location if you like then define what songs the jukebox is going to play you can choose your entire music collection or restricted just to a specific playlist tap create and be given a chance to invite your friends to join in we're going to wait on that for now and there you go your music should start playing right away now to get this connected up to your home stereo there's a couple different ways you could go you can go to aux cable and connect this up right to your home stereo if you're pretty trusting with your friends or you get a bluetooth speaker but then you kinda have to worry about wireless range for iphone users your best bet is to stream over airplay either to an apple TV or to an airport base station or to an airplay compatible speaker system to shoot this music over to the apple TV here i'm going to double tap on the home button flick the tray over here to the right and then tap the air play button to select my Apple TV all right now the hard part is done just in time since my guests are starting to arrive as they do I'm just going to tell them to download jukebox hero to control the music for hearing Eric here showed up with the Galaxy Note 2 android phone he'll download the app from the Play Store and when he opens it up he should find the party jukebox i created is nearby you'll need to sign up either using facebook or email which is kind of a pain but the payoff is worth while once he gets connected it's time to start picking some songs the interface shows you which song is currently playing along to look ahead of upcoming tracks and a history of previously played songs and people who join the jukebox you can also see how many credits you have to spend by default each guest is given 25 credits to start to add a song to the growing cue tap this button here you can browse the collection of available songs select the track and you'll be presented with three options each one comes with a price you can add the song to the back of the queue for one credit and patiently wait for it to come around if Flynn doesn't want to wait too long she can use a few more credits and add the song so it plays next after the current song and if Ryan really wants to change the song and doesn't want to wait you can make a play right now for a hefty premium this prevents any one particular person from dominating the playlist and also makes it expensive to be the jerk keeps booting off other people's music of course is your party and it's your jukebox so you're in control you get unlimited credits so you can play whatever you like and you can skip a track whenever you like complete with the satisfying record scratch sound sorry guys sorry carry on that's really all there is to it but here's some extra tips to help keep your party running smoothly first off it really is worth the time to create even a very general playlist of party appropriate tunes nobody selects a track the jukebox is going to pick one at random from whatever playlist you've defined that's great to prevent dead air but it could get embarrassing second check the settings on your jukebox up here in the right corner you can change the default number of credits or give people more credits to spend if they're running low you can also use this to blast out a little text announcement to people using the jukebox so really that's all there is to it that's how to get your friends to DJ your party for you more tips like this head over to how to cnet com I'm Donald Bell enjoy your party