WalkUp DJ 1.5 is out. Two things in this release, and they both come from the same place: watching how the app actually gets used in a dugout, which is almost never the way I pictured it at my desk.
If you’re new here, WalkUp DJ is a walk-up music app for baseball and softball teams. Build your roster, give every player a song, and hit play when they step to the plate.
Run the lineup from your Lock Screen
Here’s the thing I got wrong in version 1.0: I assumed whoever runs the music is standing there holding the phone.
They aren’t. They’re keeping the book. They’re coaching third. They’re a parent in the bleachers who got handed the phone in the second inning and also has a toddler. The phone goes in a pocket between batters, and every at-bat means pulling it out, unlocking it, finding the app, and hoping you’re still on the right batter.
So 1.5 puts the whole thing on your Lock Screen.
Start Game Mode and a Live Activity takes over. You get the current batter, their number, the song that’s playing, and who’s on deck — plus play/pause and next/previous batter, right there. Tap through your order without ever opening the app. On an iPhone with the Dynamic Island, the same controls are one long-press away from whatever else you’re doing.
It auto-advances, too. When a walk-up song finishes or hits its auto-stop, the Live Activity moves to the next batter on its own. If the order holds, you can go a full inning without touching anything but the play button.
That screenshot above is from a Friday night in July. The A’s game is streaming, and #99’s walk-up song is queued up underneath it. That’s the whole idea — the app gets out of the way and behaves like every other piece of audio on your phone.
Spotify is here
The most common piece of feedback since launch, by a wide margin: “I don’t have Apple Music.”
Fair. So 1.5 adds Spotify as a walk-up music source.
Connect your Spotify account in Settings, and you can search the Spotify catalog anywhere you’d search Apple Music. There’s a toggle in the song search screen to flip between the two, and your choice sticks per player — which means you can mix both services in the same lineup. Your center fielder’s song can come from Spotify and your catcher’s from Apple Music, and Game Mode doesn’t care. It plays the right song for the right kid either way.
Everything else works the same: custom start times so the good part hits first, auto-stop with a fade-out, AirPlay to the PA system or a Bluetooth speaker in the dugout. Songs you assigned before this update keep working exactly as they did — nothing to migrate, nothing to re-pick.
Two requirements worth stating plainly, because they aren’t mine to waive:
- The Spotify app has to be installed on the same iPhone. WalkUp DJ hands playback off to it.
- Spotify Premium is required. Free Spotify accounts can’t play a specific track on demand, which is the entire job here.
If you don’t have Premium, Apple Music and your own uploaded audio files still work exactly as before.
Everything else
Most of the rest of this release is the unglamorous kind of work. Playback got a lot more stubborn in the situations that actually happen at a field: tapping stop while a connection is still opening, a Bluetooth speaker that takes its time, an impatient double-tap on the play button, a phone that drops to one bar behind the backstop. Every one of those used to have a way to leave the player stuck. They don’t now.
I also rebuilt how the app decides which service owns a given song, which is what made mixing Apple Music and Spotify in one lineup possible in the first place.
What it costs
No change to pricing. The free tier is still one team, up to 12 players, full Apple Music search, and Game Mode with auto-stop.
Spotify and Lock Screen controls are both Pro features. Pro is $9.99/year, or the Team Pack is $29.99 once and it’s yours forever. That’s still less than one month of the streaming service you’re connecting to it.
Get it
WalkUp DJ 1.5 is on the App Store now, for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro.
Summer ball is in full swing. Put your phone in your pocket and go coach.
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