Juke That

There is no real party without music and with the abundance of genres out there it's pretty difficult to satisfy everyone's requests. The man behind what plays is a DJ and along with a powerful media player, he is responsible for the audio environment. Juke That comes as the right means to turn anyone into a DJ to spice up a party or lets you have a good time while automatically choosing for you.

Although it's a music player at its core, you quickly realize the outer shell and functionality goodies make it a bit more. The application runs in fullscreen right from the start, with no option to switch to a window mode, but you find that this is not an issue at all thanks to the design.

A neat advantage is the integrated help system for most major areas, which is also part of the welcome committee. The first impression is powerful and the constantly changing background pictures, custom cursor, as well as well-designed menus add up to this. But it doesn't impress only on a visual side, with decent customizable features and flexible playback options.

The initial setup asks you whether or not to have songs automatically imported from your music library or if you want to take your time to import them later on, either from a playlist or custom folder. It's a good idea to take some time and organize your collection before starting to use the application, because it does a decent job at detecting files, getting them ready in the blink of an eye.

We'll start off with the player itself, which you can leave on while configuring the rest. The application is specially designed for parties, mostly because of an automatic DJ feature that picks songs according to genres, requests, new entries or number times a song has played. However, you can turn the feature off and manually pick what comes next.

Dedicating a little of your time to configure genres and playback options results in little to no effort on the behalf of anyone once a party starts. By creating multiple moods you can specify what types of genres to be played and at what frequency. Moreover, you can restrict recently played entries from popping again in the speakers for a custom amount of time, which also makes them impossible for queue.

If multiple computers are connected to a network, you can turn all of them into party stations, but you need to install the application on all of them. If done, you can share playlists and requests for a synchronized, big party.

However, sharing can be done in another way as well. Accessing the Jukebox to go feature lets you copy the entire playlist to a USB Flash drive along with an installer so you can have a different computer ready in no time. You can just tell the application to copy music to your MP3 player.

We were quite impressed with what Juke That had to offer, being well-designed from all points of view. Although there's no equalizer or other effects, it manages to make up for this with everything else it has to offer. Starting with the clever visual design and abundance of playback styles and options, you're sure to be the master of every party, or you can simply enjoy favorite artists while trying to make the cursor do a full flip. Just give it a try to see what it's about, there's a high chance you're gonna love it.