How to Find a Song From a YouTube DJ Set

Play the set to the track you want and write down the time, for example 1:12:30. Pick a moment in the middle of the track where it plays alone, not the blend into or out of it. Tracklists, chapters and useful comments are all organized by time, so every step below uses this number.

This page is the YouTube version of our full guide on how to identify a track in a DJ mix, which covers every method and when each one works.

Expand the full description under the video. Channels that film DJ sets often paste the tracklist there. If the lines start with times, YouTube may turn them into chapters: YouTube Help's page on video chapters says creators add chapters by listing timestamps and titles in the description, with the first timestamp at 00:00 and at least three timestamps in ascending order.

YouTube says chapters "break up a video into sections, each with an individual preview", so when a set has them, move to 1:12:30 and read the chapter name. Treat the names with care. The same help page says a creator can rely on automatic video chapters instead of writing their own, and an automatic title may not be a track name.

Scroll to the bottom of the expanded description. YouTube Help's page on music in a video says some videos have a section called "Music" that "shows info about the music heard in the video, like song and artist names". YouTube adds it automatically when a video is claimed by one of its copyright management tools, such as Content ID, or contains music from the YouTube Audio Library.

For a DJ set this section is a partial answer at best, for three reasons:

• It appears only on some videos. Many sets have no Music section at all.
• YouTube says that for videos with many songs, only the first ten songs appear. A long DJ set usually holds more than that.
• The section lists songs without telling you which one is playing at your timestamp, so you still have to open each one and compare it with the set by ear.

The comment section is where YouTube viewers trade track IDs. Start at the top: YouTube Help's page on comments says a channel can pin its own comment or a fan's comment, and that on a computer viewers see it at the top of the watch page with a "Pinned by" icon. Some channels pin a full tracklist. On a phone, tap the comment section to expand it first.

Then look for your minute. Viewers often type times such as 1:12:30 into their comments. On a computer, scroll to load more comments and use your browser's find function (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) to search for "1:12" and the minute before it. Check any answer by ear: a comment is one viewer's opinion.

Many sets on YouTube are festival, club-night or broadcast recordings, and tracklist sites exist for exactly those. Search the DJ plus the event and year on 1001Tracklists, which calls itself "The World's Leading DJ Tracklist/Playlist Database", and on MixesDB, a community-edited wiki of mixes.

A row marked "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 how-to on finding the tracklist for a festival set goes further into this step.

Go back to your timestamp and let Shazam or SoundHound listen.

1. In Chrome or another Chromium browser, install the Shazam extension. Apple's Shazam guide says the extension "scans and identifies music playing on a webpage", so it can listen to the YouTube tab directly.
2. Or hold a phone running Shazam or SoundHound near your speaker.
3. Try two or three moments: the breakdown, the drop and any vocal.

A filmed set is still a DJ mix, and the DJ may have changed the track's tempo or pitch or be playing an edit. A 2016 ISMIR paper, Landmark-Based Audio Fingerprinting for DJ Mix Monitoring, lists "pitch shifting, tempo modifications, cross-fading and beat-matching" among the changes DJs make and concludes that automated identification of DJ mixes "is a challenging problem".

MixTracklist does not accept YouTube links. Only SoundCloud links are accepted today, and file uploads are not supported, so there is nothing to paste from YouTube itself.

Some DJs, labels and event channels post the same recording on both platforms. Search SoundCloud for the DJ's name plus the event, and check the YouTube description for a SoundCloud link. If you find the set there, two more tools open up. SoundCloud comments are attached to the waveform by time, which our how-to on finding a song from a SoundCloud mix explains. And you can paste the SoundCloud link at /scan to get a tracklist with a timestamp and a confidence level on every track; one credit costs $3.49 and covers a set up to 2 hours. The free library at /explore is worth a search too, in case the set is already there.

If the description, the Music section, the comments, the databases and the app all come up empty, the track is probably unreleased, a private edit or a bootleg. No app or service can name music that was never released or cataloged.

Ask people. Post a comment under the video that includes the timestamp, and post the link and the time in a track ID community or on Reddit's track ID communities. Our how-to on asking for a track ID covers the wording. We think the pinned comment is the most overlooked tracklist on YouTube, so look there before anything else.