Seedio: App turns up to 150 iPhones into one giant loudspeaker

A team of six has tinkered with the perfect synchrony for eight months

The days of carrying annoying bulky boom boxes on your shoulder in order to turn streets into discotheques are over. Cheerful guitar playing hippies providing somber melodies have also become rare in our super-fast and stressful time. And still, the desire to share the happiness and the emotion of melodies with friends has not decreased. Instead of a hurdy-gurdy people now use their cell phones and smart-phones as their musical company during picnics in the park or in the schoolyard with their friends.

This has major disadvantages for the i-generation's ears, as the audio-features of most smart-phones are rather modest because of the lack of membrane width. 

Together for more volume

This problem has taxed the brains of a young Viennese group since the end of last year. Two enterprises, Supertrumpf and ask! joined forces in a team of six, aiming to link smartphones with each other in order to boost the musical pleasure. The result was "Seedio", a combination of the words "seed" and "radio"

This App enables iPhones, iPod touches and iPads to bundle the volume of each device and to enjoy songs and sets together, even if the participants are using headphones.

Perfect synchrony

This is how it works: The seeder (host) plays music from his own music library or from youtube and allows the receiver to obtain these tracks on their devices via Wi-Fi. This happens in real time, so each joining iPhone or iPad is playing the exact same tone simultaneously, thus connecting up to 150 devices in an open Wi-Fi. The App is encouraging cooperations for disco feeling, so to speak. If a receiver likes a tune, he or she can then simply purchase it on iTunes.

If one of the iPhones or iPads is used as Wi-Fi base via tethering, four participants can still be supported. The iPhone would actually even support five participants, but Austrian mobile providers limit this feature.

Hurdle cleared

"The biggest challenge was to provide synchrony between the devices without interruptions", the graphic designer Jakob Schmidt explained to the WebStandard. Similar offers can be found in the app store, but until now nobody seemed to have found the right algorithm for the critical synchrony.

If you would like to try Seedio yourself, you can do this for free during the start-up period. After that there will be two versions, a free one for receivers and one for 2.39 € for seeders, who can then also disperse their music. All you need is iOS 4.2 or a more recent version. (zw, derStandard.at, 1.8.2012)