This year BiCon will have a DIY Silent Disco on Friday night. Here's some more about it from organiser Katy…

The problem is, any loud noise generally gets shut down by 11pm and people would rather keep dancing much longer. What I'm trying to do is find an app where I can stream music on my phone and people can pick up that stream on their own devices to play to their own headphones. Basically a silent disco. We are THE ORIGINAL. dry-hire silent disco company providing cost effective hire to all kind of events throughout the UK, such as festivals, nightclubs, weddings, silent cinema and private parties. Since 2007 we have been shipping our headphones to all corners of this fine nation.

When and where is it?

On the Friday night of BiCon 2018, in the main bar from 9.30-11pm.

What’s a silent disco?

A standard silent disco is one where everyone wears headphones and everyone dances to music from a DJ. It’s just like a normal dance party except that nobody else hears the music, so it’s great for places that don’t allow loud noise.

What’s a DIY silent disco?

• It’s a silent disco without a DJ or equipment. Instead, anyone who wants to join in brings their phone or some other way to play music, and their own headphones or earbuds. Then we all dance together, but not necessarily to the same songs.

What will I need to bring?

• Something to play music on – your phone, an MP3 player, etc. If you don’t have anything to play music on but still want to join in, contact us and we’ll try to arrange something.
• Headphones or earbuds. (Again, if you don’t have any, get in touch and we’ll see what we can sort out.)

What music will I be listening to?

• We will have public Spotify playlists in different genres available (see the bottom of this post for details) so if you have Spotify you can listen to those. Because everyone will be listening individually, you can skip around between playlists, skip songs, whatever – it’s entirely up to you.
• You can also bring your own music and listen to that, in whatever format works for you.
• If you’d like to create a Spotify playlist for other people to use as well if they want to, please feel free! All you need to do is tell people how to find it.
• You can search Spotify for playlists, but it’s not always reliable, so if you can’t find a playlist on the night by searching BiCon 2018, check the #biconUK hashtag on Twitter for links, or find Katy who can message you links.
• If you’d like people to know what you’re dancing to, you can Tweet your current song using #biconUK or post to the FaceBook BiCon group – we’ll have a silent disco thread on the night.

Will it be weird that everyone’s listening to different music?

• Not nearly as weird as you might think. Although the music in everyone’s head is different, it’s surprisingly easy to imagine that we’re all dancing to the same beat. There’s probably some kind of profound message there. 😊

Will people be watching me?

• No more so than they would be as a traditional disco. It might feel odd for a bit, but that should wear off. And if you do decide it feels too strange, you can stop or take a break at any time, obviously.

What are the advantages of having a DIY silent disco at BiCon?

• There are a lot of people at BiCon who don’t like hearing loud music in the bar and find it’s hard to talk over. This solves that problem.
• There are a lot of people at BiCon who have very disparate musical tastes – not surprisingly, since it’s a gathering based around sexuality not musical taste. This means you can dance at BiCon to your own choice of music.

What will it be like in the bar if I’m not taking part in the silent disco?

• Quieter!
• If you’re in the bar and not taking part in the silent disco, feel free to enjoy the sight of people dancing just as you would at any disco, but please don’t make anyone feel self-conscious – we’re sure nobody at BiCon would even think of pointing or laughing at anyone, but just for clarity, please don’t. It can be odd watching people dance when you can’t hear the music, but you’ll soon get used to it.

Playing music in multiple rooms around the house can be an expensive endeavor, with products like Sonos costing upwards of $300 per speaker. If you’ve already got a handful of phones, tablets and laptops connected to existing speakers around the house, why not sync them together so they’re all playing the same songs at the same time?

Speakerfy, an app that officially launches on iPhone and iPad this week, and on Windows and Android next week, is a quick and dirty way to make it happen. It allows you to synchronize audio playback on multiple phones, tablets and laptops, so you can listen to the same music while wandering from room to room.

(Whole-home audio isn’t Speakerfy’s primary intended function. It’s actually billed as a “social sound” app, allowing people to listen to music together across devices. Yes, it’s an app for silent discos. No, I’m not hip enough to partake in said discos. Whole-home audio it is.)

Speakerfy streams audio over your local Wi-Fi network, or over a shared mobile hotspot, to any device that’s also running the app. Just send an invite to the devices you want to connect, then choose a song, album or playlist from your music collection. The other devices will start playing music in time with the host device.

Right now, Speakerfy isn’t perfect. Every time you play a new song, there’s a delay of a few seconds as the devices get in sync, and once playback begins, the receiving devices stutter for a moment while the audio falls in line. John Wright, Speakerfy’s president, told me that the company’s working on the issue.

The app itself is also aesthetically rough around the edges, and it’s prone to strange behavior. When I first tried the app, my iPhone and iPad failed to get in sync, and a message told me to force-close and restart the app. I had to do that again later on, when I’d left both devices idle for a while.

Finally, there’s one major limitation to Speakerfy: It can only play music that’s stored locally on the host device. That’s not a problem if you’ve got a huge iTunes library on your iPhone or iPad, but Speakerfy is useless if you rely on streaming services like Spotify, Rdio or Pandora. Speakerfy wants to add streaming music sources eventually, but copyright and technical issues are making it tricky, Wright said.

If you want something more reliable and capable, I’d recommend Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil software for Windows or Mac. Airfoil costs $25–though you can try it for free–and streams any audio source, including online services. It’s also a lot smoother than Speakerfy in my experience. On the downside, Airfoil requires a Windows PC or Mac as the audio source, so you can’t stream directly from a phone or tablet. There’s no Android version of Airfoil, either.

Silent Disco App Spotify Download

Speakerfy has other plans in the works. An app update is coming in a few weeks, with a new user interface and more features, including the ability to stream phone call audio to a PC. The company is also looking to partner with speaker and headphone makers to integrate streaming audio, and is also open to partnerships with phone and tablet vendors, allowing them to build song sharing into their products.

Silent Disco App Spotify Sync

For now, the plan is to build out Speakerfy’s standalone apps with more features. If Speakerfy can work out some of the technical kinks, it’ll be a winner for music lovers.