Your Jellyfin music library as a radio station with an AI DJ.

Jay Dee mirrors a Jellyfin music library into SQLite, identifies every album, artist and track against MusicBrainz (your ID3 tags are treated as hints, never truth), has Claude research every act you own, embeds the research for semantic search, and puts an AI DJ on top: you type a theme, it builds a set from your library, writes and voices the patter, and plays it in a browser station with a Winamp-style Radio mode and a full-art TV mode. Works on phones too, and deploys to Coolify.

Ask for "rainy afternoon vaporwave with a Celtic detour" and you get ten tracks you already own, in an order that makes sense, with a DJ who knows why each one is there and what to say about it. Call in mid-set to steer it. Thumbs down an artist and it never comes back.

MusicBrainz, the local embedding model and Kokoro are free.

The station itself is cheap: a ten-track set with an opener and a couple of segues costs well under a cent on OpenRouter, and the code refuses to spend past OPENROUTER_DAILY_CAP_USD (default one dollar). Weeks of daily listening came to a few dollars.

The up-front cost is research, and it is paid in Claude usage, not dollars. Every artist and album you own gets its own Claude Code subagent: Sonnet with a small web budget for the acts you play most, Haiku working from a prepared packet for the long tail (five per agent), the same for albums. A library of a couple of thousand artists is several hundred agent runs. That is a real bite out of a Claude subscription's limits, spread over days or weeks.

The design leans into that instead of hiding it:

• It runs unattended. One "conductor" agent claims a batch, spawns the researchers, waits, ingests, and loops. Your own session stays tiny; the subagents do the reading, and the context is only carried around before it drops.
• It stops cleanly at a usage limit and resumes later. State lives only in SQLite. Nothing is ever redone, and nothing has to finish in one sitting. Point it at the queue in the hours your plan's allowance would otherwise expire unused: overnight, or the tail end of a reset window.
• Your heaviest-played artists come first, so the DJ gets good early and the long tail fills in behind it.
• What it produces is yours forever: a research corpus about your own collection, queryable by vibe, with sources noted. That is the thing the DJ reads from, and it never needs an LLM again once written.

If you would rather not spend subscription usage on the long tail there is an optional bulk-draft mode through OpenRouter (npm run research -- bulk), locked behind an explicit env flag because it spends money.

git clone https://github.com/NTBooks/jay-dee.git
cd jay-dee
npm install
cp .env.example .env      # Jellyfin URL + API key, OpenRouter key, voice server
npm run doctor

Then open the folder in Claude Code and say "set up Jay Dee for me". The jaydee-setup skill walks through .env, interviews you for a taste profile (this is the DJ's system prompt; do not skip it), picks which Jellyfin libraries count, runs the first sync and MusicBrainz pass, researches a first batch of artists, builds the index and starts your first show at http://localhost:3131.

Doing it by hand instead:

• Radio mode: Webamp (Winamp 2 in the browser) plays the queue; the side panel shows now playing, up next, history, saved sets, a call-in box and the DJ transcript. On phones the equalizer stays closed and a thumb-sized transport bar appears.
• TV mode: full-bleed artist and album art, rotating facts from the research corpus, big transport. The default on phones. Album mode plays whole owned albums front to back along the theme.
• Call in: tell the DJ "more of that, nothing after 1999, skip the synths". It answers on air and re-plans what is queued after the current track.
• Thumbs: up to hear more like it, down to never hear it again, double-tap down to block the artist.
• Lock-screen controls on phones (Media Session API), installable as a home-screen app.
• One shared show. Everyone on the URL hears the same queue; one browser drives it and others can take over. That is deliberate: it is a station, not a personal player.
• Cost tracker in the header: this show, today, all-time, straight from OpenRouter.

1. Tags are hints, never truth. ID3 years and genres are stored as tag_* and used only to find the right MusicBrainz entity. Everything the DJ sees comes from resolved columns and research.
2. Never invent tracks. Only Jellyfin ids that exist in the database are ever queued; LLM picks outside the candidate list are dropped and logged.
3. State lives in the database. Every stage is resumable and every session starts with a status command.
4. The taste profile is the product. A generic DJ is boring. data/taste/profile.md (gitignored, written by the jaydee-taste interview) is the DJ's system prompt and the researchers' listener context.
5. Spend is guarded. Hard daily cap on OpenRouter, bulk research locked unless unlocked, research never runs on OpenRouter by default.

src/config.mjs (.env) · src/db/ (idempotent schema + additive migrations) · src/jellyfin/ (client, sync) · src/research/ (identify, sources, packets, queue, ingest, derive, notable, bulk) · src/embed/ (model, index) · src/llm/ (OpenRouter, prompts) · src/dj/ (candidates, planner, albums, tts, station, vetoes) · src/server/ (Express app, routes) · public/ (the player) · scripts/ (thin CLIs) · .claude/skills/ (the Claude Code skills) · export-skills/ (the same skills plus templates, for use from another assistant or ~/.claude/skills).

Project rules for Claude Code sessions are in CLAUDE.md. Deployment is in DEPLOY.md.

Open the repo in Claude Code and they are available immediately:

MIT. See LICENSE.