Ever had a party ruined by your host's atrocious taste in music? Then you might welcome a system that polls the musical preferences of party-goers and creates a playlist to keep everyone happy.

Developed by computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, US, the Smart Party system relies on people carrying Wi-Fi-enabled music-playing devices.

Software running on each device beams each user's playlist to a nearby computer, which is connected to an amp and speakers.

The computer takes a poll of titles to work out the most popular genre and can also copy and play tracks from each device. It can then play music from the most popular overall music genre or tracks supplied by each party-goer in turn.

Office party

The technology was developed by Kevin Eustice and colleague Peter Reiher, both from the University of California, Los Angeles, US, and revealed at the Consumer Communications and Networking Conference in Las Vegas, US.

To test the idea, the UCLA team has set up a prototype Smart Party system in three offices of the university's computer science department. This system can respond to playlists stored on notebook computers and, in future, should work with portable music players.

Since it can detect the proximity of people by triangulating wireless signals, when someone has left a room their playlist can be removed from the musical ballot to reflect the music of the remaining occupants.

The system is democratic too: "In our current implementation, all votes are equal – one device might propose heavy metal, another pop," Eustice says.

Licensed to rock?

There is just one thorny problem with the scheme – digital rights management (DRM). This is because the central PC temporarily copies tracks from each device before playing them, which may be deemed a copyright infringement.

"We could deal with content that has no DRM issues – free content – but that's not a very realistic scenario," Eustice says. "So we may need to figure out ways for the mobile device to temporarily and securely transfer its licence to play the music to the computer."

DRM aside, Eustice concedes that mischievous types could subvert the system for their own amusement.

"There are in fact a number of things you could do that are not so friendly," he says. "Instead of storing a playlist you like for the ballot, you could vote against the musical interests of others by storing tracks you know they don't like."

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