DJ Set Tracklists: Who Writes Them and How to Read One

A tracklist is the running order of a DJ set written down. Each row is one recording, and a full row answers four things: who made it, what it is called, which version was played, and when it starts in the recording of the set. Many lists add the record label, and some add links to a store or a streaming service.

A tracklist is not the same thing as a playlist. A playlist is a set of whole songs you can play in any order. A tracklist describes one continuous performance in which tracks overlap, get shortened, get looped, and sometimes play two at a time. That is why tracklists have their own notation, covered below, and why a row can be honest and still incomplete.

If you arrived here looking for one specific track rather than the whole list, start with how to identify a track in a DJ mix. This page explains the lists themselves: where they come from, how far to trust them, and how to read them.

Every tracklist you find online was written by one of four authors, and knowing which one tells you most of what you need to know about its gaps.

• The DJ. Some DJs post their own list under the upload or in the description. It is first-hand, but DJs leave out tracks they want to keep to themselves, and few add timestamps.
• The promoter, festival or radio show. Radio shows and mix series often publish a list with each episode because the show needs one anyway. Mixcloud has pushed uploaders in the same direction for years: a Mixcloud uploading guide from June 2014 tells creators to add a tracklist and timestamp every upload, and says uploads that do so get a better response from listeners.
• Fans and tracklist communities. 1001Tracklists relies on member submissions: its FAQ says a standard user can submit tracklists after correctly identifying five tracks, that users who submit five clean tracklists gain editing rights, and that staff manually validate new tracks to keep them accurate and avoid duplicates. MixesDB, launched on December 16, 2006, describes its mixes as added by music lovers from all over the world, asks readers to correct mistakes they find, and runs under the slogan "We care about correctness because most do not."
• Automated identification. Software listens to the audio and matches what it hears against a catalog of released recordings. Platforms do this for licensing, collecting societies do it in clubs, and services such as MixTracklist do it for listeners who paste a link at /scan. How music recognition works covers the method.

Most good lists end up as a mix of these: the DJ's own post, timestamps from a fan, and gaps filled weeks later when the unreleased tracks come out.

Listeners use a tracklist to answer one question: what is the track playing at a given minute. A list with timestamps answers it in seconds; a list without them leaves you counting rows and guessing. That question is the reason most people go looking for a tracklist at all.

DJs use tracklists to dig. A set by a DJ you trust is a filtered view of thousands of new releases, and the list turns it into something you can shop from. When a row pays off, buying a track you found in a mix covers the stores and the file formats.

Platforms need the list for licensing. Mixcloud says an upload longer than 15 minutes is treated as a show, and that shows can include copyrighted music because Mixcloud detects the underlying artists and rights holders and pays royalties on the uploader's behalf. It also applies limits on how many tracks from one artist, album or compilation a single show may contain.

Songwriters, producers and labels are the audience most people forget. In the United Kingdom, PRS for Music says it pays royalties when DJs play music at licensed venues and festivals, and that to make those payments accurate it uses setlists submitted by DJs and venues. It asks DJs to submit their setlists so the creators of the tracks they play can earn royalties. When setlists are not provided, PRS says its music researchers monitor what is played and combine that with broadcast data and play counts.

PRS names the weakness of that system: DJ sets are often spontaneous, which makes traditional setlist reporting difficult. Its answer is Music Recognition Technology (MRT), which it has used in licensed venues and festivals since October 2018. Boxes installed in venues create a digital fingerprint of every track a DJ plays and compare it with a database of more than 100 million tracks held by a company called DJ Monitor. PRS says 78 devices were installed in 51 venues at the time it wrote the page, that MRT supplements its other methods instead of replacing them, and that DJs should keep reporting sets through its setlist portal.

PPL, which ran the first trial with PRS, said in its October 11, 2018 announcement that the pilot captured more than 31 million seconds of music, with up to 95% of all music played successfully reported back to PRS for Music and PPL, and that both societies were extending their distribution policies to use the data. What was played decides who gets paid, whether the record comes from a person typing a list or a machine listening.

No kind of tracklist is complete by default. Each fails in its own way.

• DJ-written lists are right about what they include and quiet about what they leave out. Expect missing timestamps, missing versions, and unreleased tracks written as ID.
• Promoter and radio lists are often typed from the DJ's notes before or after the show, so the order can differ from what was played, and last-minute changes do not always make it in.
• Community lists are the most detailed for big festival and radio sets, where many people are listening for mistakes. They are thin or absent for small club recordings, and a fresh page is a draft: rows change for days as members correct each other. MixesDB's help pages describe careful titling rules, which helps consistency but does not guarantee any single row.
• Automated lists cover the whole recording with exact timestamps and do not get tired at hour three. Their blind spot is structural: a recording can only be matched if it exists in the catalog being searched. PRS makes the same point to its own members, telling them their tracks need to be in DJ Monitor's database to be identified. Unreleased tracks, private edits and live mashups come back empty or, worse, as a similar released version.

The practical rule: the more sources agree on a row, the more you can trust it. A row that only one author vouches for, human or machine, deserves a listen before you spend money on it.

Five conventions cover nearly every row.

1. Timestamps. The time at the start of a row is where that track enters in the recording, not how long it lasts. The MixesDB tracklist rules use minutes in square brackets for mixes under 100 minutes and a clock format such as [1:12:30] for longer ones. With a time and no list, see finding a track by timestamp.
2. Artist - Title (Version). The version sits in parentheses after the title: (Extended Mix), (Dub), or a named remix such as (Jerome Sydenham's Blacktro Dub), MixesDB's example of using the official version name. MixesDB leaves out (Original Mix), because a row with no version is assumed to be the original. A remix is a different recording, sold separately.
3. Label in square brackets. MixesDB's base format ends with the label and catalog number in square brackets, for example [Cocoon], with white labels shortened to [White] and dubplates to [Dub]. The label is the fastest way to find the right release in a store.
4. "w/" for tracks layered together. When two recordings play at once, the second is listed under the first with "w/" in front and no number of its own. On the 1001Tracklists page for Martin Garrix's Tomorrowland Mainstage set of July 26, 2026, one row reads "w/ Martin Garrix ft. John & Michel - Now That I've Found You (Acappella)".
5. "ID" for what nobody can name yet. "ID - ID" means neither the artist nor the title is known. "Artist - ID" means only the title is missing; the same Tomorrowland page has rows such as "NOME. - ID" and "AFROJACK & R3HAB - ID". MixesDB writes unknowns with a question mark instead, as in "? - Track" or "Artist - Track (? Remix)". See what a track ID is.

Treat a doubtful row as a hypothesis and test it against the recording.

1. Go to the timestamp in the set and listen for about a minute. Note one thing you could recognize again: a vocal line, a chord stab, the bass pattern, or the sound that arrives after the breakdown.
2. Open the suggested track on a store or streaming page and skip through it until you reach the part you noted. A store preview is an excerpt, so use a full stream when the preview misses that part.
3. Compare the element you noted, not the overall feel. Tracks in one genre share drums and tempo; they do not share a vocal or a lead line.
4. Allow for the DJ. The track in the set may be faster or slower than the release, and another track may be playing over it. Listen past the layer on top.
5. Check the version. If the melody matches and the arrangement does not, open the other versions of the same title. A remix often keeps the vocal and replaces everything around it.
6. Check the neighbors. If the row above or below matches better, the list is right and the timestamp is a few minutes off, which is common in hand-written lists.

Phone apps such as Shazam and SoundHound can give a second opinion if you hold the phone to a stretch where only one track is playing. They struggle in the blend between two tracks; why Shazam cannot identify a song in a mix explains what to try instead. If no candidate survives the listen, the row is an ID for now, and the honest move is to mark it as one.

Start with what is free. Every tracklist already in the MixTracklist library can be read at /explore with no account, and every track has its own page listing the sets it was played in, with the timestamp in each.

If the set has no list anywhere, paste its SoundCloud link at /scan. Only SoundCloud links are accepted today; YouTube, Mixcloud and file uploads are not supported. Sets from 15 minutes to 5 hours work, and a shorter link is treated as a single track and refused before any charge. A typical 90-minute set takes about five to eight minutes, and an email arrives when it is done, so you can leave the page.

The result is a tracklist with a timestamp on every track, store and streaming links where they are found, and a confidence score on each row from 0 to 100 on a colored badge: lime is high (75 and up), amber is in between, and gray is low and worth checking by ear. A "Double match" label means two independent matches agreed; use the routine above for the gray rows. Identifying a new set costs credits with no subscription, from $3.49 for one credit, which covers a set up to 2 hours; credits never expire, and a run that fails or recognizes nothing is refunded automatically. The details are on /pricing.

There are cases where MixTracklist is not the answer. It cannot identify music that has never been released or cataloged anywhere, so those rows stay unidentified, exactly as they would on a community page. For a festival set filmed for YouTube, the community lists will usually be faster and richer; finding the tracklist for a festival set walks through that search. In our view the best tracklist is the one that says plainly which rows it is unsure about.