Game DJ guide

Everything the app does, in the order you'll meet it. If you're in a hurry: install it, open a category, import a few sounds, give them hotkeys, and you're ready for a game.

Install and first run

Open the .dmg you downloaded and drag Game DJ to your Applications folder. The app is signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens normally — no security warnings to click past.

On first launch you get a default profile with a few empty categories. Nothing is locked: the 14-day trial has every feature switched on.

Trial and licence

The trial runs for 14 days from first launch. A banner in the bottom-left corner shows Trial — N days left. No account and no card are needed.

Subscribing

Click Buy a license in the trial banner or in the activation window. Your browser opens a secure Paddle checkout. When the payment goes through, the app picks up the licence and activates itself — nothing to copy or paste.

Activating a key you were given

If you received a key directly (a pilot or demo licence, for example), click Activate and paste the whole key into the box. Keys are long — make sure you copied all of it, since a truncated key reads as invalid.

Managing or cancelling your subscription

Open Settings → General → License and click Manage subscription. That opens the Paddle customer portal in your browser, where you can cancel, switch payment method, or download past invoices. Nothing to email, nobody to wait on.

Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you've already paid for, so you keep working until then. Nothing you've made is deleted either — subscribe again later and your categories, sounds and rosters are exactly where you left them.

How licensing behaves

• It works offline. Your licence is verified on your own machine, so a dead network never locks you out mid-game.
• Device limit. Each key covers a set number of computers. Past that, activation refuses with already used on too many devices — email us and we'll reset it.

Categories and sounds

Everything lives in categories — Goals, Intros, Ads, whatever suits you. Add one with + Category in the top bar. Drag categories by their handle to reorder them.

Inside a category, + Add audio opens five ways to get sound in:

• Files from computer — pick individual MP3/WAV files.
• Folder from computer — import everything in a folder at once.
• From Spotify — see Spotify and Apple Music.
• Record audio — capture an ad from your microphone.
• Write speech — type a line and have it spoken.

The top bar

• Esc — Stop whatever is playing.
• Space — Fade out, or resume with a fade.
• ↺ Reset — marks every track unplayed again. Use it between matches so you can see at a glance what you've already used.
• Vol — master volume.

Cue points, fades and hotkeys

Click Edit on any track to open its editor. This is where a rough file becomes a tight cue.

• Start and End (m:ss.d) — trim the silence off the front so the horn lands the moment you press the key. Leave End empty to play to the end.
• Set from playhead — play the track, and when you hear the right spot, click this instead of guessing numbers.
• Fade in / Fade out — in seconds.
• On track end — Play again (loops, good for warm-up beds), Go to next, or Stop.
• Hotkey — press a number from 1 to 9. That key now fires this sound from anywhere in the app.
• Image — give the pad artwork so you find it by sight, not by reading.

Recording and speech

Record audio

Records a sponsor read or an announcement straight from your microphone and saves it into a category as a normal track — cue points, fades and hotkeys all apply. The first time, macOS asks permission to use the mic.

Write speech

Type what the announcer should say, pick the language (Finnish or English) and the voice (female or male), and ▶ Preview it. Happy with it? Save to category. It becomes an ordinary audio file, which means it keeps working later even with no network.

Spotify and Apple Music

Streaming in the top bar opens the panel. Game DJ doesn't stream anything itself — it drives the app already running on your computer, so background music comes from the subscription you already pay for.

Spotify has two modes, picked at the top of the panel.

Normal mode

The default, and there's nothing to configure. Keep the Spotify desktop app open and logged in, and Game DJ controls it directly. Add tracks by pasting a Spotify link (open.spotify.com/track/…); the name and cover art come along automatically.

• Premium is required — Spotify only permits this remote control on Premium accounts.
• On Windows, normal mode can only start a track: no pause, seek or volume from Game DJ. Full control works on a Mac.
• Playlists are added as a single background pad rather than as individual tracks. Spotify doesn't let the app list a playlist's contents, so the whole list plays as one thing. For individual songs, paste their links.
• No search — you add tracks by link. If you want search, use developer mode.

Spotify developer mode

The alternative, for when you'd rather search for tracks inside Game DJ than paste links. It costs you a one-time setup: create your own app in Spotify's developer portal, register the redirect URI exactly as http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback, then paste the Client ID into Game DJ and log in once.

Most people never need this. Normal mode does the same job as long as you have the links.

Apple Music (Mac only)

Same idea: Game DJ controls the Music app on your Mac. The catch is that Apple only allows playback of songs in your own library — not arbitrary catalogue links. So add the songs you want in Music first (+ Add), then search for them in Game DJ. macOS will ask once for permission to control Music; say yes. An Apple Music subscription is required, and this doesn't work on Windows.

Timeline

The timeline sits under the categories and holds the running order: warm-up, line-ups, sponsor reads, anthem. Drag sounds onto it from any category — that copies them, so the original pad stays where it is.

• ▶ Start begins the sequence; ⏭ Go to next moves on with a crossfade; ⏮ Go to start rewinds; Clear empties it.
• Click anywhere on the timeline to set where playback starts.
• Ctrl + scroll wheel zooms; the middle mouse button pans.
• Clip width matches duration, so the layout is a real picture of how long things take.

Above each clip is its position in the sequence; below it is the predicted wall-clock time. That prediction anchors to when the playing clip actually started — so if you start the warm-up four minutes late, every time below shifts with it and still tells the truth.

Match announcements

📣 Announce in the top bar opens the announcing panel. Type a scorer's number and Game DJ speaks the whole thing — name, assist, new score — in Finnish or English.

Pick your sport first

The sport lives in Settings → General, because it's a set-and-forget choice. It decides which event types you get and which announcement wording is used:

• Floorball and Ice hockey — Goal, Penalty, Timeout.
• Football — Goal, Card, Substitution. No penalties or timeouts.

Each sport keeps its own templates, so tuning the floorball wording never touches your football wording.

Rosters

Enter the team names, then fill the rosters. ⇪ Import from Excel reads a sheet with the number and the name in their own columns — a header row is fine, and the importer works it out. Not sure of the shape? ⇩ Export template gives you a file to fill in. You can also type players in by hand with + Add player.

Once a roster is loaded, you only ever type numbers: the names come from it.

Announcing an event

Choose the event type, the match time, the team and the player number(s), then press 📣 Announce. Or use Save event without announcing to log something quietly — handy when the hall PA is busy.

The score is computed from the events themselves, so it can't drift out of sync. ↶ Undo last removes the most recent event; Reset match clears the lot.

Fixing a mistake

Wrong scorer? Tap the event in the list to edit it. Correct the number and you get two choices: 📣 Announce correction, which reads out something like “Correction: SB Pro's 1st goal was scored by number 14”, or Save correction without announcing if the crowd never needs to know.

Getting the events out

⇩ Export to Excel writes the whole event list — time, type, team, players, assists, penalty minutes, cards, substitutions — to a spreadsheet for the match report.

Rewriting what the announcer says

Every sentence is a template, edited under Settings → Announcements per sport and per language. Variables get filled in as it speaks: {team}, {time}, {player}, {playerName}, {assist}, {homeScore}, {awayScore} and more. Anything inside [ ] is dropped when its data is missing — so [Assist number {assist}.] simply disappears on an unassisted goal. Reset to defaults undoes any experiment.

When a name is pronounced wrong

Club abbreviations trip up speech synthesis — Finnish is especially prone to it. Under Settings → Announcing → Pronunciations, write the spelling on the left and how it should sound on the right (FoSu → Fosu). It applies to every announcement and every written speech.

Profiles

Profiles in the top bar keeps separate sets of categories and tracks — one per team, venue or event type. Export a profile to a file and share it with another operator; cue times, fades and Spotify tracks travel with it.

Settings

⚙ Settings in the top bar, three tabs:

• General — app language (Finnish/English, changes instantly, no restart) and your sport.
• Announcing — announcer settings and the pronunciation list.
• Announcements — the announcement templates, per sport and language.

Updates

Game DJ updates itself. A new version downloads quietly in the background; a banner then offers to restart, and the update is applied. You're never the one chasing a download link an hour before a game.

Troubleshooting

The microphone won't record

macOS blocks mic access until you allow it: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone, switch Game DJ on, then reopen the app.

Spotify doesn't respond

Check three things: the Spotify desktop app is open and logged in, the account is Premium, and — on Windows — remember normal mode can only start tracks, not pause or seek them.

Apple Music does nothing

The first attempt triggers a macOS permission prompt (Game DJ wants to control Music). If you dismissed it, re-enable it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation. Also check the song is in your library — catalogue-only songs can't be played this way.

An announcement mangles a name

Add it to Settings → Announcing → Pronunciations, spelling on the left and sound on the right.

The licence key won't activate

Most often it's an incomplete copy — the keys are long, so grab all of it. Otherwise the key may be on too many devices already, or it may have been revoked. Email gamedj@waveric.fi and we'll sort it out.

Still stuck

Write to gamedj@waveric.fi. Tell us what you were doing and which version you're on — a real person reads it.