How to use Suffering Jukebox

Start here

You do not need an account to listen. Open any artist, press play, and the music starts.

Sign in with Google when you want the site to remember things: your ratings, your play history, your playlists, the artists you have added, and the songs you have hidden. Signing in is also what lets you add music and put a jukebox on air.

Finding music

Explore Artists is the front page: every artist anyone has added. Tap a card to open it, then Explore Artist Discography to go in, or ▶ Play to start listening straight away.

Above the grid, Sort changes the order and Card Size changes how much each card tells you: artist name only, total YouTube plays, or full details.

Search

Search at the top of the screen looks through songs, artists and lyrics at once. Searching a line you half remember is often the quickest way back to a song, and it will take you to the right point in the right jukebox.

Every artist has an address

Each artist gets their own page at sufferingjukebox.stream/artist-name. That address is the whole jukebox, charts and all. It is the thing to send somebody.

Jukebox controls

Inside an artist's jukebox, five views show the same records five ways. The view buttons sit under Jukebox Controls, which you can fold away with the caret beside the label.

What the bars measure

On the first four views every album carries a bar, and the caret on the view button is where you choose what that bar is counting.

• Total YouTube Views: how many times the videos behind these songs have been watched on YouTube. The public number.
• Jukebox Score: thumbs people have given these songs here, plus playback reactions (hearts sent while a song plays).
• Jukebox Plays: how many times the album has been played on this site, by anyone.
• My Jukebox Plays: how many times you have played it. Signed in only.
• Hide Bars: just the covers, no chart.

The same jukebox, five ways

Screenshots are generated automatically each night for every artist in the jukebox, for easy downloading and sharing. These are the Silver Jews ones.

Timeline

Records spaced by release date. The gap between 2008 and 2019 is the point.

By Views

Same albums, biggest first.

Albums List

No charts, every song on screen.

All Tracks

One table, sortable by views, plays or your own plays.

Sorting All Tracks

All Tracks has no chart, so it gets a sort instead: Chronological, YouTube Views, My Plays and Total Jukebox Plays. Every one of them is highest first. Clicking a number column in the table sorts biggest first the first time, and flips on the second click.

Opening and closing songs

⊕ Expand All Tracks and ⊖ Collapse All Tracks open or close every album's song list at once. On a phone, and on any jukebox with more albums than fit comfortably across the screen, albums start closed so the chart has room to breathe. Open the ones you want with ▼ tracks.

Showing fewer albums

The album filter above the chart takes albums out of the view. That changes the charts, the queue and what ▶ Play plays, so it is also how you say "studio albums only, no compilations".

Playing music

Click any song for Play now or Add to queue. Play now starts it immediately. Add to queue puts it at the end of what is coming up. Clicking an album's play button queues the whole record.

The queue

• Reorder with the ▲ and ▼ arrows on each row, or Move up and Move down in its ⋯ menu.
• Play this song next jumps a song to the front of the line, and it holds even with shuffle running.
• Search inside a long queue with the box at the top of the list.
• Save Playlist turns the whole queue into a playlist you can come back to.

Shuffle can follow your taste

In Playback preferences under the account menu, pick how shuffle behaves:

• Discovery: bring songs forward that do not get played much.
• Favorites First: lean on what you already like.
• Less Repeats: push songs you played recently back.
• No Preferences: an even shuffle.

On a phone

The phone player is built around big buttons: shuffle, back, a large play, forward and repeat in a row under the video, with the timeline above them. One panel underneath switches between the words and the playlist, and it remembers which one you had open.

Rating songs

Every song carries a thumb and a heart. The thumb feeds Jukebox Score, which is one of the things the chart bars can measure. A heart is a playback reaction: you send it from the player while a song is playing, and it stamps the moment you were at. It also counts toward Jukebox Score (+1 each). Right-click a heart on a computer, or hold it down on a phone, to take back the last one you sent.

Playlists

A playlist is just a queue you kept. There are three ways to build one.

• From what is playing. Queue up songs however you like, then Save Playlist in the player.
• Song by song. The ⋯ menu next to any song has Add to playlist. The tick is the toggle, so tapping a playlist that already has the song takes it back out. One control, both jobs, nothing to confirm.
• From a YouTube playlist. Start a playlist draft, search YouTube playlists or paste a playlist link, look through the songs it found, and tick the ones you want. You are never forced to take all of it.

Manage Playlists in the account menu is where they all live. A playlist can be private to you or public, and a public one has its own shareable page. The Playlists view inside a jukebox shows the ones that touch that artist.

Adding music

Sign in, then open Import Music from the account menu, the home page or the top toolbar. How much you are bringing in decides which door you take.

One song

Search YouTube, pick the video, done. The song does not land on its own: it also creates the artist if we do not have them yet, files it under a Singles album, and pulls in the artwork and view count, so songs by the same band group together and the artist gets a card on Explore Artists.

The artist name is read off the upload and shown to you before it lands, so you can see what it is going to be called. A "- Topic" channel is treated as YouTube's own statement of who the artist is, then an Artist - Title split, then the channel name.

A playlist

Start a playlist draft, then search YouTube playlists or paste a playlist link. You get the songs it contains, and you tick the ones you want to keep.

A whole discography

Pick An artist, type the name, and we go and find the records. Step 2 is a tick list of albums. Leave them all ticked for the full discography, or untick down to the ones you want. To bring in a single record, use this door and tick just that album.

What happens while it runs

For each album we look for the matching YouTube playlist. When there is not one, the album is built song by song from the record's real tracklist instead of being skipped, and it is only created if we found at least half of it. Release dates, artwork and lyrics are filled in afterwards.

A big discography takes a few minutes. You can shrink the window down to a pill and carry on using the site while it works, and it will tell you when it is done.

Public or private

Step 2 also asks who gets to see it.

You can change your mind later from the artist card, which carries a Visible to All / In My Private Jukebox control if you were the one who added it. Two things worth knowing:

• An artist already in the catalog keeps the visibility they have. Your private import will not hide somebody else's public artist, and a public import will not drag a private one into the open.
• Going private never locks you out of your own music.

Single songs are added privately by default. Make them public from the card afterwards.

Refining what you added

An import is a starting point, not a finished thing. The ⋯ next to any song is where you fix it, and the same menu opens from a track row, from the queue and from the player toolbar.

Versions

A song usually has more than one video behind it: the album audio, the official video, a live take. We keep every one we have ever seen rather than replacing them. Discover alternative version goes looking for more, and the Versions menu in the player switches between them.

The version marked primary is the one that plays. Set it after you have heard the version play, not from the list.

Lyric timing

A music video with a long instrumental intro needs the words shifted to match. The offset is set per video, not per song, so fixing the music video does not knock the album audio out of time. It is in the Versions menu.

When a video is broken

Report a problem on any song whose video will not play. Reported videos are checked and replaced automatically overnight, and the old one stays on record rather than vanishing, so nothing is lost if the replacement turns out to be worse.

Hiding things, just for you

• Take a break from this song puts it away for a while.
• Block hides it for good.

Both are yours alone. Neither one touches anybody else's jukebox.

Fixing an artist

Manage My Artists in the account menu works at the artist level: visibility, hidden albums, background audio, and re-running an import that only brought part of a discography in. An artist that came in narrower than their full discography shows Import Discography into Jukebox on their card until a full run clears it.

Lyrics

Words appear under the song in the player, and they scroll in time with it when we have timed words for that recording. The search box reads them too, so a half-remembered line will find the song.

Editing them

Anyone signed in can edit lyrics. Press Edit under the words, or ＋ Add Lyrics where there are none, type, and save.

Every save is kept. History shows who changed what and when, so a bad edit is never permanent and nothing has to be protected to be safe.

Why some songs have no words

When a song is imported we look it up in a public, openly licensed lyrics database. If it is not in there, we do not have it. We do not scrape lyrics from anywhere else.

That is why words tend to be missing on:

• obscure records, demos and cassette-era releases
• live takes, alternate versions and one-off uploads
• instrumentals
• songs whose YouTube upload is titled differently from the release

Add them yourself and everyone gets them.

The Online Jukebox

Turn your jukebox on from the account menu and it becomes a shared listening room. Send the code to the people you are listening with, and anyone who scans it lands on a page, joins with no sign-in and no app, browses your whole collection, and adds to the same queue you are playing.

The room is your player, seen from outside

Whatever is in your queue is what the room shows, at the same second, with the same line of the song lit up. Songs guests add turn up in your own queue marked Added by their name.

What guests can and cannot do

Guests are numbered until they choose a name. You set how many songs one person may have waiting.

Who is listening

The listeners panel shows everybody in the room right now and how long they have been there. Click a name to see the songs that person queued, what is still waiting and what has already played, with the ban control in the same place. People who have left drop off the list rather than piling up, so the count is always the number of people actually there.

The panel keeps working with the console closed, which is the normal state for a host who is watching the room rather than running it. While you are broadcasting, the player carries a Broadcasting Live badge, and clicking it opens the panel.

Give the room a short address

sufferingjukebox.stream/yourword is easier to pass on than a six-character code. Set it in the console next to the jukebox name. Both save together.

A room that has gone quiet

An offline station is not a dead page. Visitors are told the station is offline and offered the last running order you broadcast, sent straight to their own Suffering Jukebox player, where it behaves like any other queue: reorder it, save it, rate the songs, read the words.

Sharing

The Share button on the controls row asks what you want: a link, or pictures.

A link

Sharing sends the whole jukebox you are looking at, at sufferingjukebox.stream/artist-name. Sharing your queue works the same way: anyone with the link can open it and press play, without an account. Individual songs have their own share option in the ⋯ menu.

Pictures

Every artist discography is screenshotted every night. Export Image hands you a ready picture instead of drawing one on your device, so it works on a phone.

• Eight views per artist, matching the views in the app, with tracks open and closed.
• Each one in a normal shape and a tall shape sized for stories.
• Plus a link preview card, which is what shows up when you paste an artist's address into a chat.

If you have hidden albums in a jukebox, that picture is drawn on the spot instead, so it matches what is on your screen.

Managing your music

Everything below is in the account menu, top right once you are signed in.

My Jukebox

Your own shelf, in two halves. Import music is where you add things. My library is what you have got: the songs and artists you brought in, with quick removal for anything you would rather not keep.

Manage My Artists

Artist-level housekeeping: restore artists you hid from the grid, switch an artist between public and private, hide albums you do not want in the charts, upload background audio, and re-run a partial import.

Manage Playlists

Rename, reorder, delete, and switch a playlist between private and public.

Data & Analytics

Your own listening, charted: plays by artist, your favorite artists by rating, plays by track, plays by day and time of week, and plays over time. Click any bar, track or day cell to filter everything else to that slice, and click it again to clear.

Export downloads a CSV of your full play history, or a CSV of every artist you have played with their albums, tracks, links and play counts.

Audio storage

How much background-play audio you have uploaded, and how much room is left. See How the site works for what this is actually for.

Change Log

What changed on the site, by date, in plain language. The account menu also shows when the app was last updated.

How the site works

Everything you hear is a public YouTube video. Suffering Jukebox is a way of organizing and playing them. It does not host music. When you press play you are watching a YouTube video, and the artist and the label get that view exactly as they would if you had opened it on YouTube yourself.

The album art, release dates, tracklists and view counts come from what YouTube and public music databases publish. Lyrics come from an openly licensed lyrics database, and from listeners typing them in.

Background play on a phone

A YouTube embed stops the moment your screen locks. Nothing we can build changes that for YouTube itself. There are two ways to keep music going with the screen off:

• Connect Spotify Premium in Settings → Playback. Matched songs play through Spotify (on a phone, in the Spotify app). Full Premium is required — Free, Lite and Mini do not unlock this. Songs with no Spotify match still use YouTube.
• Or upload your own audio file for a song. Only your account can ever hear that file. It is never played for another listener and never appears in anybody else's jukebox.

Everyone gets 500 MB of upload storage. File size limits scale with how long the track is. The meter under Audio storage in the account menu shows what you have used.

You must have the right to store and personally play whatever you upload. On a computer, and on a phone with the screen on, none of this is involved at all for YouTube listening. Spotify Premium playback works on desktop in the browser as well.

Artists who want their own music available for background play to everyone can go through Artist Upload, which is a separate, reviewed process.

Where the numbers come from

Play counts on the audio side are plays on this site. They are not podcast or streaming download figures, and we will never present them as such.

About the data

Suffering Jukebox is built out of public sources and listener effort. Albums, dates, artwork, tracklists and lyrics come from public music databases and from whichever YouTube upload we could find. Any of it can be wrong.

Things that are commonly wrong, so you know what you are looking at:

• A song can be matched to a live version, a re-upload or, occasionally, a cover.
• An album can be missing songs that are not on YouTube at all.
• A release year can belong to a reissue rather than the original pressing.
• View counts belong to the video, not to the song. A song with three uploads has three counts, and we chart the biggest one that still plays.
• Lyrics are written and edited by listeners, and can be wrong or incomplete.
• An artist page shows the albums somebody chose to import, which may not be the whole discography.

All of it is fixable from the ⋯ menu, and fixing it helps everybody who comes after you. But nothing here should be treated as a discography of record.

Common questions