How to Identify a Track in a DJ Mix

Before you try to recognize anything, check whether somebody has already written the answer down. Note the time of the track first (for example 1:12:30), because every method on this page works better with a timestamp. Then look in four places.

• The mix description. Uploaders on SoundCloud, YouTube and Mixcloud often paste the tracklist under the player. Expand the description fully before you do anything else.
• 1001Tracklists, which describes itself as "The World's Leading DJ Tracklist/Playlist Database". It is strongest on festival sets, radio shows and well-known DJs.
• MixesDB, a community-edited wiki of mixes whose front page counted more than 360,000 mix pages when we checked in September 2026. It reaches further back and further underground.
• The MixTracklist library at /explore. Reading any tracklist there is free and needs no account, and every track has its own page listing the sets it was played in, with the timestamp in each.

Search by DJ name plus the event, show or date. A published tracklist is not always complete. A row that reads "ID - ID" means the track is still unnamed: DJ Mag's 2025 feature on tracklist secrecy notes that sites like 1001Tracklists use "ID" for an unreleased song a DJ is playing. Our guides to DJ set tracklists and to what a track ID is go deeper on both points.

If there is no tracklist, the comments are the next cheapest place to look, because other listeners have usually asked the same question at the same minute.

On SoundCloud, comments are tied to time. SoundCloud's help center says that on the web you click the area below the waveform "to leave a comment at that exact timestamp". That means the comments sitting around 1:12:30 on the waveform are about the music at 1:12:30. Look for a "track ID?" question near your timestamp and read its replies; the uploader or another listener often answers there.

On YouTube, comments are not attached to the timeline, but viewers type timestamps into them. Search the comment section for your minute mark, and read the top of the section, where a channel can pin a full tracklist.

Comments have limits. An answer in a comment is one stranger's opinion, so check it by ear against the mix. Uploaders can also switch comments off, and a small upload may have none. In 2016 Vice listed SoundCloud and Mixcloud comment sections among its six ways to identify tracks without Shazam, and the method is still worth two minutes. The platform-specific steps are in our how-tos for a SoundCloud mix and a YouTube DJ set.

Shazam and SoundHound are free and take seconds, so they are the right third step. They work best when the track has been released and is playing alone, close to its original speed.

1. Pick a moment in the middle of the track, well away from the transitions, where only one record is playing.
2. Hold a phone running Shazam or SoundHound near the speaker. On an iPhone, iPad or Mac you can skip the second device: Apple's support page for identifying songs says Music Recognition in Control Center identifies music playing around you and music playing on your device while you wear headphones.
3. On a computer, use the browser. Apple says the Shazam extension for Chromium browsers "scans and identifies music playing on a webpage", which covers a SoundCloud or YouTube tab.
4. Try two or three different moments: the breakdown, the drop and any vocal.
5. Check the result by ear. Play the suggested track on Beatport, Bandcamp, Traxsource or a streaming service and compare it with the mix at your timestamp. Make sure you have the right remix, not only the right title.

The honest limit is scale. An app names one track per attempt, and you have to find a clean moment for each one. For a single track in a commercial set that is fine. For thirty tracks in a two-hour set it is an evening of work, with gaps wherever the app returns nothing.

A recognition app does not understand music. It compares a fingerprint of what it hears with fingerprints of recordings it already holds. Avery Wang's 2003 paper, An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm, describes the method behind Shazam: peaks in the audio's time-frequency picture are paired into hashes and looked up in a database. Wang writes that the algorithm was designed to recognize "sound files that are already present in the database", that it "is not expected to generalize to live recordings", and that it is "very sensitive to which particular version of a track has been sampled".

Noise is not the main problem. The same paper reports correct matches through voices and traffic noise, and even several tracks playing together. The problem is what a DJ does to the record. A 2016 ISMIR paper from Johannes Kepler University Linz, Landmark-Based Audio Fingerprinting for DJ Mix Monitoring, lists the changes: "pitch shifting, tempo modifications, cross-fading and beat-matching". The authors tested three fingerprinting systems on real DJ mixes and concluded that automated identification of DJ mixes "is a challenging problem".

In practice an app returns nothing mid-mix for one of three reasons:

• The DJ changed the tempo or pitch, so the audio no longer lines up with the reference recording.
• The track is an edit, bootleg, mashup or live version, which is a different recording from the one in the database.
• The track is unreleased or was never cataloged, so there is nothing to match.

Our guide to how music recognition works explains the mechanics, and there is a separate how-to for when Shazam can't identify a song in a mix.

If the track has words, you have a search term that no tempo change can damage. Type the clearest line into a search engine inside quotation marks and add the word lyrics. If that returns pop songs, add the genre or the DJ's name.

Expect one complication: club tracks often sample an older vocal, so the lyrics can lead you to the sampled original instead of the track you heard. That is still progress. Search the original's title together with "remix" or "edit" on Discogs, Beatport, Bandcamp and Traxsource, and listen to the previews until one matches the mix.

A melody can be searched too. Google launched hum to search on October 15, 2020: you hum, whistle or sing for 10 to 15 seconds and it suggests songs. SoundHound's App Store listing makes the same offer: "sing or hum the tune, and we'll do the rest".

Both routes depend on the track having something to sing. They suit vocal house, trance and anything with a lead melody. A percussive techno track with no hook gives them nothing to work with, and a little-known release may not be in their catalogs at all. If the track has no words and no tune you can hum, move on to people.

People recognize what software cannot: an unreleased promo they heard last weekend, a bootleg passed around a scene, a white label from 1994. Vice's 2016 roundup named the Identification of Music Group on Facebook, which had 29,000 members at the time, and Reddit communities such as r/mixes and r/tracklists. Reddit's track ID communities and genre-specific forums work the same way today.

The quality of the answer depends on the quality of the question. Post all of this:

1. A link to the mix and the exact timestamp where the track is clearly audible, not the transition into it.
2. The DJ, the event or show, and the date, since regulars may know what that DJ was playing that season.
3. The genre and anything you can describe: a vocal line, a distinctive synth, a sample you recognize.
4. What you already tried, so nobody replies with "have you tried Shazam".

Be patient and be skeptical. An answer can take days or never arrive, and a confident reply can still be wrong, so check every suggestion by ear. Our how-tos on asking for a track ID and finding a track by timestamp cover the wording and the etiquette.

When a track is unreleased, the only people who can name it are the DJ, the producer and the label. Ask politely and specifically: comment on the upload at the timestamp, reply to the post where the DJ shared the set, or send a short message that includes the link and the time.

Do not expect an answer every time. The DJ Mag feature quotes DJ Bigos, who posts tracklists in the comments of SoundCloud mixes, saying he started because he "was frustrated that so many DJs wouldn't share their tracklists"; it also describes one well-known DJ yelling at him for identifying tracks and another deleting his comments. Some DJs guard an exclusive record for as long as they can, and some simply do not read their messages.

If the DJ stays silent, look sideways. Check who the DJ releases music with, and listen to the upcoming releases of those labels on Beatport, Bandcamp and SoundCloud, because a DJ's unknown tracks are often their own productions or promos from close labels. Then wait. Many unreleased tracks come out eventually, and tracklist pages get corrected after they do, so revisit the set's page on 1001Tracklists or MixesDB a few months later. The full routine is in our how-to on finding an unreleased track ID.

When you want the whole tracklist, not one track, identifying the set in one pass saves the most time. On MixTracklist you paste a SoundCloud mix link at /scan and get back a tracklist with a timestamp on every track, a confidence level per track, and store and streaming links where we find them. The badge shows a score from 0 to 100: 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. A typical 90-minute set takes about five to eight minutes, and an email arrives when it is done. If you ran the set, you can export the tracklist as text, CSV or a rekordbox file, and ask for a second listen on any single track.

It is not always the answer. We accept only SoundCloud links today: not YouTube, not Mixcloud, not file uploads. Sets must run from 15 minutes to 5 hours. It costs credits (pricing starts at $3.49 for one credit, which covers a set up to 2 hours), so check the free library first. And no service can name music that was never released or cataloged; those rows stay unidentified.

Which method fits which situation:

• A famous DJ or festival set: 1001Tracklists or MixesDB first.
• One released track and a phone in your hand: Shazam or SoundHound on a clean passage.
• A vocal hook: a lyrics search, then Discogs or Beatport to find the right remix.
• An underground or unreleased track: a community, then the DJ or label.
• Every track in a SoundCloud set: a whole-set scan.

We think the order matters more than the tool: two minutes spent looking for an existing tracklist saves more time than any app.