The best way to play music in a pub quiz

A music round is the best round of the night and the most annoying one to build. This post is about the boring part: how you actually get a few seconds of the right song out of a speaker at the right moment, without the round turning into five minutes of you squinting at a progress bar. For the round formats themselves (decade shuffles, cover versions, backwards intros), see our music round ideas.

The short verdict: to avoid faff, use a tool that plays a trimmed clip for you. If the venue WiFi is bad, use MP3 files.

The four options side by side

Option 1: Spotify from a phone or laptop

Everyone has it, it has nearly every song, and it takes no preparation. That's the appeal.

The catch is that Spotify has no clip function. As far as I know there's no built-in way to start a track at a chosen point and stop it after eight seconds (that's my own experience, not something I've seen Spotify document). So you scrub the progress bar while a room of people watches you, find the bit you wanted, and hope you landed on the right second. Do that ten times in a row and the round drags.

The other problems are the ones you'd expect:

• Notifications and a locked phone screen can cut in. A laptop that goes to sleep mid-round takes the music with it.
• Between questions you're in a different app from your quiz, so getting back to the slide means switching windows with the room waiting.

Option 2: YouTube in a browser tab

YouTube has the thing Spotify doesn't: almost everything. Live versions, TV themes, old adverts, that one obscure cover. If the clip only exists there, this is how you play it.

The mechanics are similar to Spotify, with a few extras. You can often start a video at a specific time by adding it to the link, which helps, but you still stop it by hand. The video is also on screen, which can give the answer away. And in my experience, ads are the real danger: a pre-roll ad before a five-second clip is a good way to kill the energy. I can't tell you how often that will happen to you, since it depends on the video and your account, but it's a risk you have to plan around.

The usual workaround is a tab per clip, queued in order. It works, and it's exactly the sort of thing that goes wrong at 9:15pm with a full pub.

Option 3: MP3 files, trimmed in Audacity, played from PowerPoint

This is the old reliable method. You get each track as a file, trim it to the bit you want in something like Audacity (free and open source), drop the clips into slides or a playlist, and play them from PowerPoint or a media player. SpeedQuizzing describes a similar setup for its own app: the host copies audio files from their own music collection into a folder.

What it gets right: the start point and length are baked in, so there's no scrubbing and no ads. Once the file is on your laptop it plays, with or without internet. If you've ever run a quiz in a pub where the WiFi is a rumour, you know how much that matters.

What it costs you:

• Time. Ten clips means finding ten tracks, getting them as files, trimming each one, and exporting. Changing a question next week means doing it again.
• Storage and housekeeping. A folder of clips per quiz adds up, and six months in you won't remember which file was which unless you name them carefully.

Option 4: a quiz tool that handles the clip

Declaring an interest here, because this article is published by quizquiz.co and this is the option it sells. You paste a YouTube link into a music question, set the start point and the clip length, and playback controls sit in the presenter. There's no downloading and no trimming. You set it up once while you're writing the quiz, and on the night you press play, the clip runs for the length you chose, and you move to the next slide.

That fixes the live-scrubbing problem and most of the tab juggling, because the quiz and the music live in the same place, and the phone remote starts and stops the clips too, so you can run the round from the middle of the floor.

The catches, honestly:

• The clips stream from YouTube, so they need a connection. A trimmed MP3 on your laptop doesn't.
• The audio comes from YouTube, so you're limited to what's on YouTube, and anything that goes wrong on YouTube's side (a video removed, say) goes wrong for you.
• It's a small independent project, not an established company.

Where the other options win

We'd rather you picked the right one than ours.

• Spotify is the easiest thing to reach for between rounds. Nobody needs a clip function to play something decent while teams queue for the bar. Put a playlist on before people arrive and forget about it.
• YouTube wins when the clip only exists there. Obscure tracks, TV themes, live versions, old adverts. If you can't find it anywhere else, you can't play it from anywhere else.
• MP3 files win when the WiFi can't be trusted. This is common. A downloaded file is the only option here that will definitely play with no connection at all. If you run in a venue with a patchy signal, prepare the files and keep them on the laptop.

A tool that handles the clip is the best fit when you're building the quiz anyway, you've got a decent connection, and you don't want ten clips to be an evening's work.

Getting the craft right, whatever you use

Pick the recognisable bit. Wikipedia notes that music rounds often use only the intro or another non-vocal segment of each song. A SpeedQuizzing article describing its own app format uses clips of about five seconds. Those are examples of what people do, not a standard. My own opinion, clearly labelled as such: aim for somewhere around ten seconds, and start at whichever bit people sing along to, whether or not that's the intro. Five seconds is brutal in a loud room.

Write the answer sheet so a half-remembered title still scores. Decide in advance what you'll accept. Artist or title, one point each. "Bowie" counts as David Bowie. If you're running answers on phones, you can override any mark by hand, which saves arguments. Whatever you choose, announce it before the round.

Plan for the speakers you'll actually have. A pub PA and a laptop's built-in speakers are different worlds. Test the clip volume in the room before people arrive, and test it again once it's full. Bass-heavy intros that sound great in headphones can vanish through a cheap speaker.

If you want the formats to build around all of this, they're in music round ideas. When you're ready to try the clip approach, the quiz maker is free to build and present with, and how to run a great pub quiz covers the rest of the night.