EchoNest

When the queue runs dry, Bender picks the next track using one of five weighted strategies. The preview appears below the now-playing area — click Spotify to open it, Queue to add it, or Filter to skip and get a different pick.

Nests are breakout rooms — each one gets its own queue, voting, and Bender instance. Create a Nest and share its 5-character code to let others join. Seed it with a genre and Bender will auto-fill that Nest with matching tracks when the queue empties.

Useful for splitting a party into rooms (chill lounge vs. dance floor) or letting a small group take over without hijacking the main queue.

The queue you see is only half the story. Where a newly-added song lands depends on a penalty system designed to keep things fair.

Queue position is based on when a song was added, plus penalties. The penalty formula: the total length of all songs you already have in the queue, plus 2 raised to the power of how many songs you have queued. If you're spamming songs with overlapping title words and they make up more than half the queue, those count double for the exponential penalty.

Example:

Alice, Bob, and Carol are listening. At time 0, Alice adds two 7-minute songs to an empty queue. Five minutes later, Bob adds two songs, then Carol adds three. Carol's third song and Bob's second both have "love" in the title.

• Alice's first song: 0 penalty (2⁰)
• Alice's second song: 9 min penalty (7 + 2¹)
• Bob's first song: 0 penalty, enters at 5 min
• Bob's second song: 5 min penalty (3 + 2¹)
• Carol's first song: 0 penalty, enters at 5 min
• Carol's second song: 6 min penalty (4 + 2¹)
• Carol's third song: 13 min penalty (5 + 2³ due to keyword overlap)

Resulting queue order:

1. Bob1 - 5 min
2. Carol1 - 5 min
3. Alice2 - 9 min
4. Bob2 - 10 min
5. Carol2 - 11 min
6. Carol3 - 18 min