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As the holiday season approaches and some restrictions are lifted by the global pandemic, you are likely planning some sort of get-together for friends and family.
While food and drink and music are important, lighting is one of the things that is often overlooked but can dramatically change the mood of the party.
If the lighting is too strong, your guests will feel embarrassed; if it is too dark, the party atmosphere will become so bad that you will forever have the reputation of “the host who makes things terribly dark”. And nobody wants that. .
But as always on TechRadar, there is hope through technology: the best smart lights are a great way to create the perfect atmosphere in your home as they can be dimmed or brightened and the color adjusted from your smartphone.
Maybe you already have that under control and have equipped your entire house with smart lighting. Did you know, however, that some can even blink and change color to match the beat of the music?
Philips Hue, LIFX and Nanosheet Smart lights previously offered this feature through third-party apps, but they always required your smartphone’s microphone to hear the music being played before the lights were adjusted accordingly.
Earlier this year, Philips Hue announced a partnership with Spotify that uses an algorithm to analyze the metadata of the song playing in the app in real time and determine the color, brightness and speed at which it flashes according to the genre and mood of the Music, as well as the beat.
Initially, the integration was only available to Hue users who signed up for the Early Access program, but now it’s available to anyone with Philips Hue smart lights. So you can make yourself the host with most when it comes to creating a full party atmosphere.
Do you want to grab some smart Philips Hue lights? Check out the best deals now.
How to put your lights in party mode
As mentioned earlier, this feature is specifically designed for Spotify – it will not work when playing music from another streaming service.
The good news, however, is that you don’t have a Premium Spotify Account as it works with the free version. So if you are not currently a Spotify user, you can correct this by going to sign up for an account in just a few minutes.
The integration also works regardless of which device you’re listening to Spotify on, be it a phone, tablet or even through Sonos speakers.
And since your phone’s microphone is not required to hear the music playing, you can still use your smartphone to answer a call without the lights not pulsing.
The function only works with colored lightbulbs and requires a Hue bridge – a hub that is connected to your router via an Ethernet cable and then communicates with the lightbulbs so that an algorithm can analyze the tracks played via Spotify and pass on relevant commands for color can and the speed with which they pulse to the Philips Hue lamps.
The Hue bridge is not required for newer versions of the lightbulbs to set up and use in the easiest way possible as the lightbulbs are Bluetooth.
Anyway, it is Required when you want to control the lightbulbs when you are not around and for features that sync the lightbulbs with other products like your TV and for services like Spotify. I’m a newer Hue user, but I want that fancy perk
The Hue Bridge comes with starter kits priced at $ 119.99 / £ 129.99 / AU $ 179.99, but also individually for $ 49.99 / £ 49.99 / AU $ 84.99 are available.
What does the integration actually look like?
So what can you expect? We put the Philips Hue and Spotify integration to the test and were impressed. As we played tracks from different genres, we found that there was a clear difference between the colors the lightbulb illuminated and the intensity of the brightness it shone.
There are five color palettes with fixed shades to choose from; For example, Nocturnal is a selection of turquoise, blue and purple tones, as well as an automatic mode that uses each of the 16 million color tones offered by the Philips Hue lamps when playing different tracks.
When listening to Michael Bubble’s version of Feeling Good, the lights glowed pale shades of purple, pale pink, and warm peach and pulsed in a subtle manner at the beginning, increasing in intensity as the intensity of the track increased.
As we switched to bass heavy dance music, the color changed to brightly intense pinks and oranges and there was a more pronounced pulsating movement as the lightbulbs got darker and lighter too.
Up to 10 lightbulbs can be controlled in this way at the same time and each lightbulb lights up with the color palette in a different shade so that the atmosphere is reflected in every centimeter of the room.
How to set up the Philips Hue Spotify integration
To get started, you need to link your Spotify account to your Philips Hue app and the Spotify app must be installed on your smartphone. Open the Philips Hue app, tap the Sync tab at the bottom of the screen, then select Spotify from the options panel.
The Spotify app will open and you must agree to Hue to access your account by clicking “Agree”. Spotify will close and you will be left in the Hue app.
Since you can also synchronize Philips Hue lights with your TV, you must select “Listen to music†from the activities listed. Now you can choose up to 10 Hue lights installed in your home to sync with Spotify.
You also need to highlight the position of these lights in your room in relation to the speaker position on a chart so that when Spotify sync is active, Hue can achieve the perfect color balance.
Just drag the icon of each light you’ve added to the sync to its approximate location on the diagram – you can also adjust the height at which the light sits.
The synchronization is now complete. If you want to enable it, open the Hue app and press the Sync tab. From here, tap the sync icon in the middle of the screen to start or stop the Spotify integration.
Use the buttons above this labeled intensity, color or brightness to manually optimize these aspects or to switch to automatic mode. Above it, the cover of the track being played is displayed and can be recorded to open the Spotify app if you want to change the track, album or playlist.
We found the Hue and Spotify integration was easy to set up and definitely gives our house the party vibe. So what are you waiting for – set it up and give your gathering the atmosphere it deserves.
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