How to identify every track in a DJ mix on YouTube

The fastest way to identify the songs in a DJ mix on YouTube is to read before you listen. Open the description and look for a tracklist or timestamps, then open the comments and sort by top, because on any mix with a few thousand views somebody has already posted IDs against timestamps. Search the mix on 1001Tracklists. If those three give you most of the set, you are left with a handful of gaps, and those are the ones worth spending effort on: Shazam at the right moment, a pause on the deck screen if the video shows one, and, for the whole set in one go, a tool that fingerprints the mix in segments and hands back a timestamped tracklist.

That order matters because each step is cheaper than the next. Here is how to work through it without losing an evening.

Read the description first

Channels that upload mixes regularly, whether that is a club’s own channel, a radio show, a festival or a bedroom mix series, usually put a tracklist in the description. Sometimes it is the full list with timestamps, sometimes it is a partial list with “ID” where the uploader did not know either, and sometimes it is a single link to a tracklist site.

Click “more” under the video to expand it, because the tracklist is often below the sponsor links and the socials. Timestamps in a description become chapters, so if the progress bar has chapter markers, the names of those chapters are frequently the track names.

If the description says nothing, check the channel’s other videos. A mix series will often post the tracklist a week later as a community post or in the next episode’s description. Then check the DJ’s own socials, because the person who played the set is the one most likely to have posted what they played.

Mine the comments

Comments on a mix are where the crowd does its work. Sort by top rather than newest, look for anything with a timestamp in it, and look for replies from the channel, because uploaders confirm IDs in replies more often than they edit descriptions.

Timestamps in comments are clickable, so you can jump straight to the moment and check the suggestion against your own ears. Treat a lone comment as a lead and a comment with several agreeing replies as an answer. People are wrong about IDs all the time, usually by naming the original when it is a remix or an edit, so before you buy anything, listen to the store preview against the mix.

The other thing comments give you is the state of play. If the top comment on a mix from three months ago is “track at 42:10?” with no answer, that track is probably an ID in the proper sense, and no amount of fingerprinting will name it until it comes out.

Check 1001Tracklists and the tracklist sites

1001Tracklists is the largest database of DJ set tracklists, and for anything played at a festival, on a big radio show or by a well-known name, the list is usually there within days. Search the DJ and the event, or paste the YouTube link into the site’s search. Each entry shows which tracks are confirmed and which are still IDs, and the discussion under each ID is often the best record of what has been tried.

For Boiler Room and similar channels, the Reddit threads for the set are worth a search, and genre forums and Discord servers keep their own lists for the sets the big sites miss. None of these will have a bedroom mix with two hundred views. For those, you are on your own, and the rest of this piece is about what to do then.

Ask for an ID properly

If you post “ID?” under a mix, you are one of thirty people who did the same, and you will be ignored. The comments that get answered give the timestamp, describe the track in a way that helps someone else recognise it, and say what has already been tried.

“ID for the track at 1:07:30, the one with the pitched vocal and the acid line, not on 1001 and Shazam gives nothing” is a comment the uploader can act on. It also helps the next person who arrives with the same question, because they can add to it rather than repeat it.

Reply to existing ID requests rather than making new ones, and if you find the answer yourself, post it. The reason the comments on popular mixes work is that people go back and fill them in.

Why Shazam struggles on a mix

Shazam and the other fingerprinting services match a short sample against a database of released recordings. A mix breaks that in several ways at once.

• Transitions. For a good chunk of any mix, two tracks are playing at the same time. The fingerprint of a blend is not the fingerprint of either track, and the service either returns nothing or picks the louder one.
• Pitch and tempo changes. A track played at plus four percent without key lock is faster and higher than the recording. Fingerprinting tolerates small changes and fails on bigger ones, and it gets worse the further from the original the DJ has gone.
• Key lock. Master tempo keeps the pitch where it was but stretches the audio to do it, which adds artefacts of its own. Fingerprinting copes with this better than with raw pitch shifting, but it is still not the audio the database knows.
• EQ, loops and effects. Bass cut, a filter sweep, a delay on the vocal, a four-bar loop repeated: each one takes the audio further from the release.
• Recordings from the room. A phone in a club records the room, not the mixer. Crowd noise and reverb are the same problem you get with any club clip.

So Shazam works on a mix only at the moments when one track is playing clean, unlooped, with no heavy effects, close to its original tempo. Those moments exist. Aim for the middle of a track, well after the previous one has gone and before the next comes in, and let it listen for the full window rather than tapping stop when it looks finished.

Pause at the deck screen

Plenty of YouTube mixes are filmed from behind the booth, and plenty of streamed sets show the DJ software on screen. Rekordbox, Serato and Traktor all display the playing track’s title and artist. Pause the video, use the comma and full stop keys to step frame by frame, and read the screen.

This is worth doing even when the fingerprint has answered, because the deck screen tells you the version. A tracklist that says the original mix when the DJ played the dub is a tracklist that sends you to buy the wrong file.

Fingerprint the mix segment by segment

If you want the whole set and the comments have not done it for you, the manual method is to work through the mix in chunks. Play it through speakers, let Shazam listen at the two-minute mark, then four, then six, and note what comes back against the timestamp. Auto mode in the Shazam app will keep listening and log matches as they arrive, which saves the tapping. On a set that runs an hour and a half you will be at it for the length of the set, and the gaps where it heard nothing still need going back over by hand.

Long-mix mode in ID Crate does the same job without you sitting there. Paste the YouTube link and the audio is fingerprinted in overlapping 30-second segments across the length of the set, so a track that was blended at the start of one window is clean in the next. The result is a timestamped tracklist, with each match verified against the stores and the gaps marked as IDs. It is on the Pro Plus plan and costs 1 credit for every 2 minutes analysed, with the estimate shown before you confirm, so a 90-minute set is 45 credits. The gaps are the interesting part. Any segment that comes back unidentified is compared against every other unidentified clip people have scanned, and you can add it to your crate to be checked daily against Spotify, Apple Music, Beatport, Bandcamp and SoundCloud until it is released.

What you end up with

At the end of all this you have a tracklist with three kinds of entry: the tracks that were named in the description or the comments, the ones you cracked yourself, and a few that are still ID. Post the ones you cracked back into the comments so the next person starts further along than you did. Buy the ones you can. Track the ones you cannot, because the reason they were IDs is that they are not out yet, and the day they land is the day you want to know.