This post is also available in: Deutsch (German)
Turn your living room into a living Hue disco – by using your Philips Hue Lights and their Entertainment feature! With iConnectHue’s Discotainment you can easily make the most of your party and get your people in dancing mood, which might even save you some booze 🙂
One of our employees even uses Discotainment to create the perfect atmosphere for concerts.
This Tutorial will show you how to set up your Entertainment areas and create the fitting vibe for your Hue disco.
- Which lights are supported?
- How to select, set up or edit an Entertainment area
- How to use the Visualization settings
- How to change single parameters of Discotainment
- Additional settings
- How does Discotainment work?
Which lights are supported?
Only color lights and only those made by Philips and labelled “Hue”. Also only those which have a recent firmware installed. This has technical reasons: To be able to control these lights in a fast way, they need to have been set up for especially Entertainment mode. Once they are in this mode, they won’t react to any other commands from apps, switches and timers.
It looks as if some Living Colors lights are also compatible – it is possible that those also sold in a “Hue” variant (Bloom, Iris) are in fact the same lights, just without the remote. So their Living Colors counterparts may receive a new firmware.
Also, make sure, when you set up an Entertainment group, that your lights used are not too far away from each other. When they are in Entertainment mode, they don’t act as repeaters any longer.
How to select, set up or edit an Entertainment area
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- Step 1: This is what Discotainment looks like when you first start it. So the first step for you is to select an entertainment group.
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- Step 2: Select to create a new entertainment area. If you already have one, you can jump right to Step 4.
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- Step 3: Select the lights you want to include – Tip: Tap on the headlines to select all lights of a group. Note that there are only 10 lights possible with Hue Entertainment. If your light doesn’t appear, make sure it has the latest firmware installed – freshly bought lights or new installations may have not.
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- If you want to edit an Entertainment area or change the light order (Sort), just swipe right on it and select what you want to do. Changing the light order influences some of the Discotainment effects.
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- Step 4: Now select the area and go back (top left).
How to use the Visualization settings
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- To save or load Visualization settings select “Save or load settings”.
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- We prepared some settings for you, go and check them out by selecting one.
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- If you already made your own Discotainment settings, you can save them here by selecting “Add as new setting” and entering a name.
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- In this example we selected our setting “D-I-S-C-O”. Select the Play button (triangle) to start Discotainment. BTW: You can start Discotainment also directly from the menu once set up. Note: Discotainment requires access to your microphone. We advise you to put your phone on a charger.
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- To make it stop, just press the stop button (rectangle) here or at the menu.
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- You can stop Discotainment also from within the group view. Just select the mirror ball top left and “Disable Discotainment”.
How to change single parameters of Discotainment
Colors
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- Select “Visualization Scenes” to change the colors used for Discotainment.
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- Now you can select or deselect the Magic Scenes you want to use for your Disco light. Note: At least one Magic Scene must be selected.
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- If the Color change mode is set to Sequential, iConnectHue tries to find repeating sequences in the music to find a rhythm on which then the colors change.
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- When color transition is changed to “Highlight”, every time the colors change the bulbs brighten up a little.
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- Here you can set how fast you want the colors to change.
Lightness
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- Change here how intense the brightness change should be.
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- Set the brightness range using the range slider.
Effects
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- Discotainment offers various effects you can activate and adjust here.
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- Use Sparkle to let your lights automatically blink to the beat. Define how often you want them to blink using “Sparkles per beat”.
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- The effect color mode “Highlight” lets your lights blink at bright white.
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- “Pass through” lets your lights blink at the color momentarily active.
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- The Strobe effect needs to be controlled manually. Change the strobe frequency to change its speed.
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- “Strobe smoothing” defines, how smooth or strong the strobe effect will be. Higher levels lead to a more faded and therefore smoother strobe.
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- Tap and hold the Strobe button to activate it.
Additional settings
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- Select the 3 dots at the top to access settings for what happens after stop and using gradient strip segments
How does Discotainment work?
Discotainment uses Hue Entertainment, which allows it to control your lights much faster than most other apps can do under normal conditions. This allows iConnectHue to do some great effects that wouldn’t be possible in this speed otherwise.
This comes with some caveats though: Since it requires a specialized firmware, currently only original Philips Hue and Friends of Hue lights with a recent firmware work. It also means, due to this specialized mode, “Hue Entertainment”, only a limited number of lights can be controlled at the same time (see How Hue Entertainment works).
As always, you get the latest technology with iConnectHue. Since it allows us to give you things others can’t do, we think the light limitations given are a fair tradeoff.
For audio, iConnectHue picks up any music using your microphone. This is the only “official” way Apple allows music to be captured by apps. There’s no universal way for an app to directly capture audio from an app playing on your device. For specific things like Spotify and Apple Music, APIs are available, but we wanted to give you a universal way that doesn’t stick you to one of these ways. Plus, iConnectHue hence isn’t only restricted to songs it knows.
Audio capturing works with quite low latency, beat detection is almost non-influenced by mid range frequency noise.