lets.dj

Worked example: sharing music and video

This is a worked example of a different kind of night. Nobody is singing. You have albums as MP3 files, a few music videos, some clips from a holiday, and you want a room to take turns choosing what plays, from their phones, on the television. It follows one mixed folder. Setting up the Bridge covers installing and connecting, and a karaoke night explains the naming and artwork rules in more detail than this page repeats.

The folder

Shared/
  Music/
    Daft Punk - Get Lucky.mp3
    Daft Punk - Get Lucky.jpg
    Fleetwood Mac - Dreams.m4a
    Fleetwood Mac - Dreams.png
    Album Rip/
      cover.jpg
      01 Intro.mp3
      02 Outro.mp3
  Videos/
    Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody.mp4
    Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody.jpg
    Holiday 2025.mov

Videos and music can sit in the same folder or in folders of their own. Bridge does not mind which. It reads the folder you chose and everything inside it, and sorts nothing: a song is a song whether it has a picture or not.

What plays

Video: MP4 (H.264 video and AAC audio), M4V, WebM and MOV. MKV, AVI, WMV and FLV are listed but will not play, as a karaoke night describes.

Audio: MP3, and M4A that holds AAC, which is what most downloads and phone recordings are. Both play on any screen. M4A files in Apple’s lossless format do not play in every browser.

Audio formats that Bridge ignores entirely: FLAC, WAV, OGG, Opus, WMA, and bare AAC files. They do not appear in search, and nothing says they were left out, which is easy to mistake for a missing folder. If part of your collection is in one of these, convert it to MP3 or to M4A with AAC first, and move the originals out of the folder.

Titles come from the file name

Bridge reads a song’s artist and title from the file name and ignores the tags inside it, the ones your music player shows. Daft Punk - Get Lucky.mp3 is “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk, whatever its tags say.

This is where music folders go wrong. Files that came from a ripped album are often named for their position, like 01 Intro.mp3, and have no artist in the name. They are still catalogued, as a song called “01 Intro” with nobody credited, which is hard to find from a phone. There are two remedies, and either is fine:

  • Rename the files to Artist - Title.mp3. A space, a hyphen, and a space are what separate the two.
  • Correct them in the app. Open the library on the Let’s DJ site, and change the title or the artist of any song. That leaves your files alone, and it stays put when Bridge rescans, so it is the better choice for a folder you do not want to touch.

Clips with no artist, like Holiday 2025.mov, need nothing. They are found by their title.

Pictures

For artwork, Bridge uses an image file beside the song with the same name, as with a video: Daft Punk - Get Lucky.mp3 and Daft Punk - Get Lucky.jpg. It also uses folder.jpg or cover.jpg as a picture for every song in that folder that has none of its own, which suits an album, as in Album Rip/ above.

The pictures inside your MP3 files are not used. Music players often keep an album cover inside each file and show it from there, so a folder can look full of artwork in a music player and have none for Bridge. If your songs have no sibling images, copy the cover out of the file into an image beside it, or into cover.jpg for an album.

Each picture must be under 1 MB, and a bigger one is skipped. They are shown on guests’ phones, in search, browse, and the queue.

What the room sees while a song plays

With a video, the screen shows the video.

With audio only, there is no picture in the file, so the screen shows one of its own, and it always names what is playing. What it shows depends on what you gave it:

  1. The artwork, if the song has a picture beside it (or a cover.jpg in its folder).
  2. The Let’s DJ neon sign, if it has none.

In both cases the song’s title and artist are shown with it, on a black background like the frame around a video. Beneath them, a row of bars in the party’s accent colour moves with the music: the screen listens to what is playing and draws it. Nothing has to be done to turn that on for Bridge.

A song with no artwork is never a black screen. It is the sign, with the title and artist. So a folder with no pictures at all still has something on the screen, and adding pictures only makes it more yours.

The bars are only for libraries that Bridge shares. A library connected from cloud storage cannot be listened to in this way, and shows its picture or the sign, with the title and artist, without them. Everything else is the same.

Running the night

  1. Rehearse first, as in Setting up the Bridge: your browser asks a question about the local network the first time the screen plays a song from your computer, and it is much better answered when nobody is watching.
  2. Add the library to the party and leave it shared, so that guests can search it. Anyone can then queue music and video from their own phone, and they play in the order they were queued. The screen goes from a video to a picture and back as the queue moves along, without anybody doing anything.
  3. Keep the computer awake, and Bridge running, until the last song.