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Philips Hue Spotify integration from today; new Hue lights too

A new Philips Hue Spotify integration has been announced, and is rolling out to the Hue app from today. This will sync your color lights to the music you’re playing on Spotify, either fully automatically or with some degree of manual control.

Unlike third-party apps like Hue Disco, the integration doesn’t rely on your iPhone microphone to listen to the music …

Instead, it gets all the music data it needs from the metadata already embedded into Spotify tracks.

Intertwine light and music.

It’s the first of its kind. We’ve partnered with Spotify to offer a unique lighting and music integration that links your Philips Hue and Spotify accounts, making your lights react to the Spotify music you love.

With Philips Hue + Spotify, the Hue app analyzes the metadata for each Spotify song in real time, resulting in a light script that on top of incorporating the beat of the song, now also reflects its mood, genre, tempo, segments, loudness, pitch and more.

Whether you’re relaxing on the couch for a cozy night in, having friends over for a get-together, or doing your chores along to a custom playlist, you’ll experience music like never before.

If you don’t like the default lightshow, you can instruct the app to react more gently or dramatically to the song.

If your Hue app has a Sync tab in the bottom center of the home screen, tap that. Otherwise, tap the Explore tab and swipe through the screens to the Spotify one. If you don’t see either option yet, then the update has yet to roll out to your device and should appear within the next few days. (Annoyingly, the way new features are added to the app means that it will claim to be up-to-date even when it it still awaiting the latest updates.)

Dynamic scenes are included in the same update.

Let your color-capable Philips Hue lights in a Room or Zone slowly transition through the different colors of any color scene in the Hue scene gallery. To use dynamic scenes, press the play button that appears on the scene card.

With this initial release, the dynamic effects will be subtle. You may not notice that your lights are changing at first. A future release will let you control the speed of dynamic scenes — stay tuned for the update!

Only color scenes you’ve added to My scenes from the Hue scene gallery can be dynamic. In the future, you’ll be able to make any color scene — even custom ones you create yourself — dynamic.

The Philips Hue Ambience Gradient Lightstrip reported back in July has also now landed. Instead of allowing the choice of a single color for the entire lightstrip, you can now opt for color gradients displaying several colors along the length of the strip using scenes created by Philips.

An 80-inch strip costs $149.99, with 40-inch extension strips available for $59.99.

Also available are Signe Gradient Floor and Table Lamps, which bring the same multi-color capabilities to upright lamps.

Additionally, Philips now offers more powerful standard bulbs – up to 1600 lumens (100w equivalent) and a White Ambience version of its arty filaments bulbs.

Expanding our range with brighter bulbs, now offering 800 lumen (60W equivalent), 1100 lumen (75W equivalent) and 1600 lumen (100W equivalent).

The Filament collection now includes bulbs that offer thousands of shades of warm-to-cool white light for the perfect light throughout the day.

Check out the promo video below for the Spotify integration.

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Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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