AmpMe app lets users play music together as one giant speaker
What good is party music if you have to spend the life of the party keeping the music going?
But what if you could link up all the phones in the room to create a hacked-together surround sound speaker of sorts? A new company called AmpMe wants to solve this problem with an app of the same name.
Instead of making a Do It Yourself (DIY) portable sound system by pairing a smartphone and wireless Bluetooth speaker to play tunes on a playlist, a new Wi-Fi-based method syncs handsets for creating one giant portable speaker. iOS and Android mobile users of iPhones, iPads, and Google phones can now use the free AmpMe app to blast rock, rap, or country music by hosting or joining a “party”.
AmpMe works by allowing a Host to sync their streaming music with friends’ devices. It also allows iOS and Android phones to play the same music together.
AmpMe uses a proprietary audio fingerprinting technology to synchronize the music across the devices and amplify the sound. Other users looking to connect to the host will have to enter a 4-digit code in order to be part of the network, which connects either over WiFi or Bluetooth. The host controls the playlist and can search for their favorite songs, artists and albums via SoundCloud. Sure, listening to music out of your iPhone’s speakers isn’t a great experience, but there’s (speaker) strength in numbers, and AmpMe is the quickest speaker replacement out there – and it’s a lot better than the old smartphone-in-a-cup trick too. If AmpMe can partner with Spotify or Apple Music to increase its library, this app might have some legs. AmpMe is launching with SoundCloud as its partner, but Archambault promises that more streaming services “will follow soon”.
‘Music was never meant to be enjoyed by a bunch of friends crowding around a single, maxed out phone speaker, but we’ve all done it, ‘ said AmpMe founder Martin-Luc Archambault.
When Archambault gave me a demo of AmpMe using five devices – four smartphones and an iPad Mini – the results were impressive.
A receiver device can pause its playback to field a call, for example, then rejoin the group afterwards. In reality, we found it cumbersome, at best.
During a test with various device, there were some problems with poor connectivity. If they do, it could prove to be a big success.