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Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with Fair Queueing

https://www.jukeboxhq.com/

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!

( 43 comments | 14 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by jp57 on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:07PM (#44501325)
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.

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by bramhaag on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @03:57PM (#44503473)
Another way to define fairness could be based on the song duration. Is it fair if two people get to play the same amount of songs, but one picks songs with an average duration of 3 minutes, while the other picks 15 minute long songs?
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by treve on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @06:37PM (#44504675)
0-trust house parties
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by itslennysfault on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:00PM (#44501237)
Very cool. It's like a much more minimal (and more open source) version of one of my favorite sites https://deepcut.live (formerly turntable.fm)
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:07PM (#44501328)
Woah! I had no idea that the URL for turntable changed. Bunch of other folks reached out and also said it reminded them of that.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by itslennysfault on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @01:22PM (#44502083)
Yeah, the "why" the URL changed is a pretty messy story.

The original founders both wanted to start a new version of the original, and had a very public feud about ownership of the domain / name. I can't find any of it now so I'm assuming it was all removed as part of the settlement. Instead, they both posted this nearly identical statement.

https://jperla.medium.com/turntable-resolution-c66c6662ad62

https://billychasen.medium.com/settlement-agreement-9d5a5366...

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by awaseem on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:02PM (#44501266)
Love this! More open source products for the better!
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by noleary on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @11:36AM (#44501014)
I love that this was a "stress-relief project."
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @02:33PM (#44502712)
Code is therapy haha
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by 4b11b4 on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @11:35AM (#44501003)
dope. If I hit next does it go next on the other people's players?
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @11:40AM (#44501062)
No, that has been a common feature request, which I didn't ship in the first version. Right now, it assumes that only one person is playing.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by 4b11b4 on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:51PM (#44501772)
Or a "vote" if one person hits next, if majority agree, then it goes next
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by thrawn0r on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @03:42AM (#44507275)
I don't think that's how a party works. At least my XP is that a majority of people are not invested that deep to curate the list in a democratic way because they're preoccupied with dancing if you do your job right :)
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by andelink on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:21PM (#44501490)
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!

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:23PM (#44501533)
THANK YOU FOR THE REC TO ODESLI!

Tbh I should have done an Ask HN. I tried googling and using the AI to find some song API which could replace youtube and nothing came up.

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by andelink on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:30PM (#44501606)
No problem! You might also consider the iTunes Search API [1] to power your search functionality e.g.

    curl 'https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=jim-e%20stack&entity=song' | jq
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by jason_zig on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:58PM (#44501836)
Ah man... anyone remember JQBX?
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @01:37PM (#44502228)
I learned about JQBX and similar platforms through people that reached out as I've been sharing Jukebox around and they seem like they were beautiful corners of the internet.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by bahrtw on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @12:58PM (#44501848)
Superfun! Would be cool if you could experience the Jukebox itself, with a playlist from visitors? Then you directly have playable songs? :)
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @01:34PM (#44502205)
Agreed! That's been the most common feature request so far.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by Aeolun on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @01:40PM (#44502257)
Oh, this is perfect. I still miss the epicpower group from Grooveshark, and it’s been nearly a decade since that shut down.

https://www.jukeboxhq.com/share/epicpower

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by altendo on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @05:04PM (#44504064)
I miss it too :( but I'm glad that we're still in people's memories :)
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by closetkantian on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @01:46PM (#44502314)
Great job!
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by Unai on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @02:21PM (#44502615)
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/

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @02:32PM (#44502709)
I had no idea there was another! The search function on that site doesn't seem to be working, but it otherwise seems much more fully featured.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by keysdev on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @03:36PM (#44503280)
Seems like your project is using YouTube API to get the songs. Would be good to make that just a plugin then one cam swap for spotify bandcamp etc while data still stays local.

Dont want a nice open source project to just turn into a front end for youtube.

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by joeyagreco on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @02:35PM (#44502739)
> Failed to search YouTube: 500

:(

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @02:45PM (#44502830)
Just fixed it. Fun fact, I have had to rotate between ~7~ 8 API keys today!

That means people have made over 70k search requests on Jukebox lol.

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by nzoschke on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @03:08PM (#44503014)
Love it!

I made an open source jukebox too. Mine models an old-school jukebox, where you set up a tablet so all your friends can browse and queue up music at a party.

https://github.com/nzoschke/jukelab https://nzoschke.github.io/jukelab/spotify/desktop

I see you're in the Bay Area. I do occasional Jukebox Happy Hour in SoMa we could meet up at...

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @03:19PM (#44503133)
I would love to! Reached out to you
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by corny on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @04:03PM (#44503538)
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.

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @04:13PM (#44503642)
Will ship that feature request. I can understand why that would be useful.

I thought about doing video, but that requires downloading and storing much more content in S3 which makes the app feel slower than it already does for just the audio.

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by cdurth on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @04:41PM (#44503888)
Ripping the video to s3, naughty naughty. Be expecting your YouTube API key to be revoked and DMCA.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by Zopieux on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @09:28PM (#44505526)
It's just a cache bro, promise
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by cdurth on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @11:14PM (#44506051)
Definitely not to skirt auto play and screen off issues ;) fun to see this is still a problem being solved. A friend and I made the same thing 10 years ago. We opted to force the screen on and play the videos to stay "legit". Explored licensing music for monetization and there was a mid 5 figure minimum to bootstrap so the project died.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Thursday July 10, 2025 @03:06AM (#44518161)
Sir, it's just a cache, sir
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by lovegrenoble on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @05:39PM (#44504289)
Another one, but for TTRPG sessions: https://dragonicle.com
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by foresto on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @08:18PM (#44505196)
Neat.

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

Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @08:28PM (#44505237)
No plans right now, but that does sound like a really cool idea.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by extraduder_ire on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @08:44PM (#44505305)
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.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by skeptrune on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @09:46PM (#44505612)
That's a good catch, fixed!
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by JodieBenitez on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @09:36PM (#44505565)
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.
Re:Show HN: Jukebox – Free, Open Source Group Playlist with ... by endlessvoid94 on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @09:45PM (#44505607)
Anyone remember tunez?

https://tunez.sourceforge.net/