How to find the tracklist of a DJ mix

Plenty of tracklists are already public. Radio shows, label podcasts and mix series usually carry the list in the description, and on a good week the pinned comment holds it instead. Open the set, read both, and you are done in ten seconds.

The catch is what those lists leave out. A DJ who wants to keep a weapon quiet writes ID where the name should be, and timestamps are optional, so twenty names under a two hour set tell you nothing about where track eleven sits. A set posted straight off a club recording usually carries no list at all.

1001tracklists is the crowd-built index of what DJs play. Festival sets and the podcasts people care about get logged there, usually with cue times attached and sometimes within a day of the set going up.

It thins out fast below that line. A Tuesday night local gig, a small SoundCloud set, a stream nobody bothered to log: none of those get an entry, and an entry that does exist can stop halfway through. For where that index helps and where it stops, see the 1001tracklists alternative breakdown.

When the text runs out, the audio is the last source left. Paste a SoundCloud, YouTube or Mixcloud link and CrateWire looks the set up on 1001tracklists first, so a set already logged under that link comes back without anything listening to the audio. Everything else gets heard: the scan walks the set in 30-second windows and fingerprints each one; a single scan takes sets up to 6 hours long on Digger, within the month's minutes, and longer on Crate and Vault.

What comes back is a list of names, each carrying the point where the scan heard it start. Where nothing matched, the gap stays in the list. That is the honest answer, and it is a different answer from a wrong name. Phone recognizers built for clean studio releases give up far earlier on this kind of audio, which is the whole subject of using Shazam on DJ sets.

Other sites handle parts of this too, some from a database and some by listening. For what each one takes and gives back, read the DJ set tracklist finders compared.

Each route solves a different kind of set. Most digs use two of them in a row.

A gap is a track with no reference recording anywhere: an unreleased cut, a dubplate, a white label, or an edit the DJ made that afternoon. No fingerprint can match a record that was never released, and no list can name it until someone who knows speaks up.

That is what DJs mean by an ID. The timestamp still earns its place, because it tells you exactly where to cue and what to ask about. What ID means in a DJ set covers how those get solved, and how to find the unreleased tracks DJs play covers what to do while you wait.

The two link types behave differently once the scan starts, so each has its own walkthrough. Getting the tracklist of a SoundCloud mix covers share links, the timestamped comments on the waveform, and why a private link fails. Getting the tracklist of a YouTube DJ set covers pinned comments and why those sets usually take the long way.