My Ollama box picks the music now: an agentic DJ running on a 9B model

I got tired of my Ollama server sitting idle between chat experiments, so I pointed it at my Navidrome library and made it run a radio station.

The DJ is an agent, not a shuffler. Each turn it gets tools (search the library, look at what played recently, check the schedule, read the weather) and picks the next track with a reason. Then it writes a short intro, TTS speaks it, and Liquidsoap ducks the music under the voice.

What surprised me:

• A 9B model with reasoning off and tool-calling on is enough. Qwen3.5 9B does the picking and the intro writing fine. Bigger models write better copy but they aren't required.
• Session memory matters more than model size. Without it the DJ repeats itself within an hour.

Fully local is real: Ollama plus Piper or Kokoro plus your own Navidrome, no API keys. One outbound call for weather (Open-Meteo). Hosted providers are optional and capped by a daily token budget.

You need your own music library and a Docker host. And it's radio, so there's no skip button, which people either love or bounce off immediately.

Here's what it sounds like: https://www.getsubwave.com/listen
Code, MIT: https://github.com/perminder-klair/subwave

Full disclosure, I built this.