The gig is Saturday. The set isn't built.

The empty playlist

Four thousand tracks. Two hours to fill.

You already know what the night needs. Saying it takes ten seconds. Digging for it takes the evening.

"90 minutes, warm up then peak time tech house."

Type that, or just pick a vibe and a length. You start from a set that already runs to time — then you do the part only you can do: swap, reorder, make it yours.

The transition

You heard the clash a bar before the room did.

It was the right track. It was just in the wrong key, and you found out live.

Once your library has been listened to — key, tempo and energy, every track — that stops being a guess. Whatever is playing, you can see what follows it well, and how well, before you commit to it.

The shape of the night

The room should peak at midnight. Not at quarter past ten.

A good set has a shape, and you can usually only see it afterwards.

Draw it first instead: warm up, lift, hold, wind down. The set is filled to that curve, and the energy line across the top shows where it sags while there is still time to fix it.

The rut

The same forty records keep finding their way in.

You bought the other three thousand nine hundred and sixty for a reason.

The tracks you lean on get held back. The ones you have neglected get put in front of you — the ones that fit, not just the ones that are old. And the same artist stops turning up twice in ten minutes.

New music

Bought this morning on the laptop. Wanted in tonight's set.

Open a web address on the computer and drag the files in. They land on the phone, in the folder you chose. No cable. No cloud drive in the middle.

The handover

The set is on your phone. The decks are plugged into something else.

A playlist that points at files your DJ software cannot find is just a list of names.

Export the set and each track is written with where it lives on your computer, not on your phone. It opens as the set you built, with your cues where you left them.

Your taste

What you think you play, and what you actually reach for.

They are rarely the same. The keys you keep landing on, the energy you settle at, the kind of track you skip without noticing.

Turn learning on and you get to see it — along with a mix of your own music that rebuilds itself each day around it. It keeps the feel of what you play, never a list of your tracks.

Your records

The catalogue has the release. It doesn't have your edit.

The promo that never came out. The bootleg from a friend. The version you cut down yourself because the intro ran too long.

Those are the tracks that make a set yours, and no lookup service has heard them. ZOOT doesn't look anything up. It listens to the files that are actually on your phone — whatever they are, wherever they came from.