This new music app links together smartphones and turns them into a giant surround sound speaker

Sometimes you just need a speaker, and cranking up the volume on your smartphone isn't going to cut it.

But what if you could link up all the phones in the room to create a giant, hacked-together surround sound speaker of sorts?

That's the idea behind AmpMe, a new music streaming app for iPhone and Android that syncs up you and your friends' phones to create a connected speaker. Sure, listening to music out of your iPhone's speakers isn't a great experience, but there's (speaker) strength in numbers, and AmpMe is the quickest speaker replacement out there - and it's a lot better than the old smartphone-in-a-cup trick too.

Created by serial entrepreneur Martin-Luc Archambault, AmpMe's secret sauce is how it syncs together all the devices in the room.

Here's how it works.

Once everyone downloads the app, the person who will be controlling the music taps the "Play" button and selects a song from the app's music library. AmpMe is launching with SoundCloud as its partner, but Archambault promises that more streaming services "will follow soon."

With the music playing, the others in the room tap the connect button on their phones and type in a 4-digit pin to join in. One of the best parts about AmpMe is that it works across iPhone and Android, and even connects to Bluetooth speakers that include a microphone, such as Jambox. The microphone is required as AmpMe syncs together the phones by sending out a high-frequency tone to other devices, which ensures there isn't a slight delay.

When Archambault gave me a demo of AmpMe using five devices - four smartphones and an iPad Mini - the results were impressive. The combined volume of all the devices was far from quiet, it got so loud at one point that I had to ask him to turn it down out of fear of annoying my colleagues working outside the conference room.

Of course, AmpMe is far from a 5.1 surround sound speaker, but it's a handy workaround when you're looking to keep the music going without access to a speaker, and its simplicity keeps things easy. If AmpMe can partner with Spotify or Apple Music to increase its library size, this app might have some legs.

You can download AmpMe for iPhone and Android starting today.

 

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