DJustify: Reason-and-Verify DJ Planning for Pop Transitions and Story-Driven Sets

Overview & Synopsis

Automatic DJ systems mostly target electronic dance music, whose regular structure makes rule-based mixing relatively easier. Vocal-rich popular music is harder: which track to play next, where to cue it, and which transition to use are tied together, so fixed rules handle them poorly. We present DJustify, a pop AI-DJ that puts an LLM in a reason--propose--verify--repair loop and lets it choose the next track, cue points, and mixing technique together. The LLM samples several transition plans; an external acoustic checker then scores the rendered audio and triggers repair when a check fails. Sampling keeps several candidate transitions per track pair instead of one fixed mix. In blind listening tests our transitions beat Mosaikbox, a reimplemented crossfade, and a cue baseline that reuses the crossfade's cues; that last comparison shows most of the margin comes from cue placement. The same planner also picks and orders a set along an emotion arc: this improves story coherence over a no-story ablation, and within a set story and transition ratings show no measurable gap from a human DJ. The checker mainly adds reliability, not higher average quality: it repairs rare but audible errors such as cut vocals, while the planner stays non-deterministic.