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

14 skeptrune 10 7/8/2025, 3:18:49 PM 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!

Comments (10)

andelink · 12m ago
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!

skeptrune · 9m ago
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.

andelink · 2m ago
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...
jp57 · 25m ago
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.

itslennysfault · 33m ago
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)
skeptrune · 25m ago
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.
awaseem · 30m ago
Love this! More open source products for the better!
noleary · 56m ago
I love that this was a "stress-relief project."
4b11b4 · 58m ago
dope. If I hit next does it go next on the other people's players?
skeptrune · 52m ago
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.