The Decks.

How to drive it. Tap the label to play or pause. Touch the record to stop it and drag to scratch, forwards or back. Touch the outer ring while it plays to nudge it faster or slower, the way you line up two records by hand. SYNC matches the other deck's tempo and lines up the beats. The four pads are hot cues: tap to set, tap to jump, hold to clear. LOOP repeats 1, 2, 4 or 8 beats. SLIP keeps the track running underneath a scratch. Double tap any knob or fader to reset it. Pinch the waveform strip (or scroll over it) to zoom. While a record plays the screen stays on.

Your controller and your keyboard. Under the decks, CONTROLLER AND KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS lets you rebind every key and map a MIDI DJ controller: press LEARN next to an action, then touch that knob, fader, button or jog wheel. Mappings save in this browser and as a file you can share. Controllers work in Chrome or Edge on a computer and Chrome on Android; Safari (Mac, iPhone, iPad) has no MIDI. Out of the box: Q W E and 1 to 4 drive deck A, P O I and 7 to 0 drive deck B, A S and K L nudge, the arrows move the crossfader, Space plays the deck on screen and Enter runs MIX IT.

The help, and what it can and cannot know. Every track is measured when it loads or joins your crate: its tempo, its key (shown on the Camelot wheel, and as it sounds at the pitch you set, because a faster record plays higher), a guess at its energy from 1 to 10, and where it drops, breaks down and starts to wind out, on its 16-beat phrases. The sixteen lights under each deck count the phrase. THE ROOM is your read of the crowd: the page cannot hear it, so you tell it. NEXT UP ranks your crate from all of that and says why. THE MIX says how to get from the playing record to the next one, and MIX IT does it on the phrase: synced, blended, the bass swapped halfway. Key and energy are estimates, worked out on this device; trust your ears over them.

Your music stays on your device. ADD MUSIC opens the Files app on an iPhone or iPad (songs saved in Files or iCloud Drive), and the file picker on a computer. Nothing is uploaded. Songs bought or streamed in the Apple Music app are locked to that app and cannot be opened by any website.

Audius. The AUDIUS tab searches Audius, an open platform where artists put up their own music for anyone to stream. Your browser asks Audius directly; Brokehella sends nothing about you and keeps nothing. Every track shows its artist and links back to them. The tracks belong to those artists, and Brokehella does not choose or check them.

The Archive. THE ARCHIVE tab opens the netlabel collection at the Internet Archive: whole releases that small electronic labels put out free, under Creative Commons licences. Each track shows its licence and links to its release. Most licences say credit the artist and no commercial use, so a recorded set that uses them is for sharing, not for selling.

Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud and YouTube. None of them lets a website mix its music. Spotify and Apple Music forbid it in their developer terms and lock the audio, and SoundCloud and Tidal only open their catalogues to licensed DJ apps such as Serato and djay. Two ways to bring them anyway: YOUR PLAYLIST takes your track names (from any of them) and finds the ones that are on Audius, ready to mix, with a link to open the rest in their own app. For Spotify it can read the list from your account instead of a paste, once that is switched on: names only, never the music. And LINE IN takes whatever this device or a plugged-in one is playing, from any app, into a deck's EQ, filter and crossfader. It is a live signal, so it cannot be scratched or synced, and nothing of it is kept.

Kept on this phone. Your cue points for each track, what was measured about each track (so it is not read twice), and three settings (pitch range, quantize, crossfader curve) stay in this browser. The crowd read and the set list are not kept at all. A recorded mix is made on your device and saved only if you press SAVE MIX. If it uses other people's tracks, ask them before you post it.