We’ve got a good one for you today, and this time there’s a release attached: listen parties are coming in Veilamp 0.4.0. Pull a few friends together — some in the room with you, some across the world — and listen to the same music at the same time, from a single shared queue that everyone gets to DJ.

Usual honesty first: 0.4.0 isn’t out yet and this is still taking shape, so some of the finer details below may shift before it ships. But listen parties are slated for that release, and they’re far enough along that we wanted to show you.

Where this fits

If you’ve been following along, this is the third piece of a trio. Multi-room audio got your own speakers playing in sync. Broadcast mode lets one DJ run a station for a crowd of listeners. Listen parties are the social flip side of broadcast — instead of one person playing to everyone, everyone is a DJ. It’s built on the same sync foundation as multi-room, pointed at a different kind of togetherness.

One queue, everyone’s a DJ

The heart of a listen party is a single shared queue that any member can edit. Add a song, pull one, reorder what’s coming up, hit skip, hit pause — anyone can do any of it, and everyone sees the change right away. There’s one queue and one playhead, and you’re all on it together.

No one’s a “host with the remote and everyone else just watches.” It’s genuinely collaborative — more like everyone crowded around the same record player, taking turns dropping on the next track. You can even kick a party off from whatever you’re already listening to, so “come listen to this with me” is one tap away.

Everyone brings their own records

Here’s the part we love: you don’t all need the same music files. Each person can add tracks from their own library, and when a song comes up, it streams peer-to-peer straight from whoever owns it to everyone else. The audio doesn’t funnel through one person or through us — it comes from the member who has the track.

That turns a listen party into collaborative crate-digging. You queue up a deep cut none of your friends have, it plays for all of them, and nobody had to send a file or find it themselves. Three people, three libraries, one shared session.

Near and far, in the same party

A party isn’t just for people in the same room, and it isn’t just for remote friends — it’s both at once. Friends across the internet connect over Veilid; people on your own network get the local fast path. You can run a party that’s all-remote, all-local, or a mix.

The bar we’re building to is “it feels together.” For remote friends that means everyone’s on the same song in the same rough spot — close enough that it feels shared, without obsessing over millisecond lockstep. For people in the same room, we tighten it up so you don’t get that annoying slap-back echo between two sets of speakers. What matters most — being on the same track — stays rock solid for everyone.

Private by design

Like everything else in Veilamp, a listen party is not public. There’s no global list of parties to browse, no directory, no stumbling in. A party is unlisted by nature, and there are exactly two ways in:

  • An invite code you paste or scan — works for anyone, even someone you haven’t added as a friend.
  • A friend’s party popping up for you — if a friend you’ve added starts one, you’ll just see something like “🎉 Alex started a listen party — Join,” no code to copy.

There’s no central server running the show. The coordination and the audio both flow peer-to-peer over Veilid’s encrypted routes, the same friends-first networking that powers sharing your library. And a track is only ever reachable to the people in the party — never the wider world.

Made to keep the party going

Parties are meant to be easy and ephemeral — start one, listen, drift apart, start another next week. We’re also designing them to be resilient: the idea is that the party doesn’t have to end just because the person who started it closes their laptop — it can carry on with everyone else still in the room. (That part’s still being shaped, but it’s where we’re headed.)

Where it stands

Keeping it honest:

  • Listen parties are targeted for 0.4.0, developed alongside the multi-room work they’re built on.
  • The hard part — keeping a mutable, shared queue in sync across people on wildly different connections — is the thing we’re proving out first.
  • It’s still a living design, so expect some of the details here to firm up (or change) by the time it lands.

No day-and-date yet beyond “0.4.0,” but this is one we can’t wait to get into your hands. Some music is just better with other people in the room — even when the room is the whole internet.

Until then — happy listening, together.