uWave is a free, self-hosted, open-source collaborative listening room. Learn its features, setup requirements, and how it compares to alternatives.
uWave is a free, open-source, self-hosted collaborative listening platform where members of a community take turns queuing up songs, videos, talks, or other media for everyone in the room to experience together, in the tradition of earlier shared DJ-booth style services.
The project is maintained on GitHub under the u-wave organization and released under the MIT license, consisting of a core server library and a web client rather than being run as a centralized commercial service.
The core experience is a turn-based DJ queue: community members line up media, and playback advances from person to person while everyone listens together and chats in real time. Media can be pulled in from external sources such as YouTube and SoundCloud through source plugins.
Since uWave is self-hosted, operators configure their own server with settings like the listening port, API keys, and a Redis connection, giving them full control over moderation, branding, and available media sources.
uWave itself is entirely free and open source, with no subscription fees or paid tiers, since there is no commercial vendor behind it.
The only real cost is the infrastructure a community chooses to run its own instance on, such as server hosting and any Redis or database services required.
An open-source, self-hosted collaborative listening platform where users take turns playing media for a shared room.
Yes, it is free and open source under the MIT license.
Yes, uWave is self-hosted, though you can also join communities already run by other hosts.
YouTube and SoundCloud by default, with additional sources possible through plugins.
An open-source community of maintainers under the u-wave GitHub organization.
uWave is primarily a web-based client accessed through a browser rather than a native mobile app.