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Design

Everyone’s a VJ with GIF Jockey

The upcoming app makes matching GIFs to music easy.
GIF Jockey on four differently-sized screens. Image courtesy of Christian Montoya.

Amateur VJs everywhere, rejoice! Now, adding visuals to your live sets is as easy as pressing “Auto Beat Match.” An app called GIF Jockey is in the works, by developer Christian Montoya, that remixes GIFs sourced from the internet or custom-made, allowing users to match the GIF’s speed to the music tempo of their choice. As the description on the project’s Kickstarter page puts it, “Most VJ apps require a computer science degree to even make sense of—GIF Jockey is for the rest of us.”

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It requires no expertise besides the ability to push a few buttons on your keyboard. The app comes with preset collections of GIFs, with names like “Summertime Chill,” “Trippy Feels,” and “Pink Internet,” so no matter the vibe of your bar, party, or living room, you can make it way weirder and more like home, a.k.a., the internet. The app allows you to change your GIF’s speed according to BPM, and direction; users can “ping pong” a GIF, or have it play once and then again in reverse.

“Pink Internet” screenshot from GIF Jockey demo

The free app will launch this summer for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is the fourth project by Montoya under his creative venture Montoya Industries; the others are The Museum of Videogame Ads, a puzzle game called No More Kings, and Beat This!, “a metronome on steroids.”

DJ Cutman, chiptune DJ and founder of video game remix record label GameChops, featured the app in one of his live Twitch broadcasts, This Week in Chiptune. If you’re into industrial chiptune and superhero cosplay, watch GIF Jockey in action below:

Find out more about Christian Montoya here, try the GIF Jockey demo here, and donate to the app's Kickstarter here.

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