If you’re looking to add a splash of color to your living space, there’s no better option on the market today than Philips Hue. With a wide variety of bulbs and light strips to choose from, Hue makes creating the perfect sense of ambiance more accessible than ever. No mood is complete without some music to match, and with a new Spotify partnership, you can finally turn your home into the living visualizer of your dreams.
Starting today, Hue products now support a new algorithm combining all of the smart lights in your home with your favorite tunes. With just a simple link between both accounts, you can get your bulbs to flash, dim, and rotate colors to any song, all while coordinating the music’s beat, tempo, and mood.
Unlike other similar programs that sync sound and lights together, this link doesn’t require a microphone to detect the songs you’re playing. Instead, Hue’s implementation is powered by a new algorithm that analyzes each song’s metadata on the fly, detecting changes in mood, genre, tempo, loudness, pitch, and more. This process results in each song getting its own unique script that matches the beat perfectly. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for party bops or soulful ballads — all of the lights match your taste in music.
To use this feature, you’ll need to ensure you have a Hue Bridge and color-capable lights on hand. Just link your accounts in the Hue app, then play a song from any device where you’re logged into Spotify, like your smartphone, laptop, tablet, or even game console. That’s significantly easier than any previous (and hacky) method, like forcing users to pair with the desktop Sync app. Likewise, this feature supports paid and free Spotify accounts alike, so you don’t need a subscription to get it up and running.
Light sync is available for early access users in the Hue 4.0 app starting today, but it may take up to seven days to reach every eligible account. To enable it, look for a “What’s New” update with a Spotify card and follow the on-screen instructions. This feature will go permanently live for all accounts in October.
