Maybe you have been here before: You stumble over a video or song but can't find out the name and title of the music. Maybe you have an old hour-long recording of several songs mixed into one set but you can't find out the names and artist behind track 4 at minute 21:00. What to do?
If you have ever been on the hunt for a name of a track you dig you will know how difficult it can be to find out the details about the artist, album and track name, especially for tracks without any "searchable" lyrics. So today I want to share this little hack with you that has mightily helped me in deciphering the names behind awesome music, regardless of what genre it is.
Early attempts
There have been several attempts to solve this problem but most of them have not really established themselves, such as songtapper or whatever the name of that site was where you were supposed to tap the rhythm of the chorus lyrics on your space bar and the website would suggest what song it might be. Well, this type of thing may work for YMCA, but what if we are looking for names of less prominent tracks, ones that don't have any lyrics at all? Is this all we got?
Nope, we want more accuracy. And we may be looking for artist's names most people may have never heard about...
Algorhythm abuse: Maybe not as intended, but it works
What you want to do is the following:
- Have your sound file ready (i.e. the song set you want to identify - preferrably in mp3)
- Use algorythms and copyright barriers to uncover the name behind the music
My preferred service for this is mixcloud.com where you can upload your mixed sets and the website will scan your tracks for anything it knows from its database and list them all for you in one convenient rush.
Now this works well even if your set contains copyright-protected material, although I do recommend pulling he set down again after you have gotten your inforamtion. You know how the industry is with copyrights...
You could also try using youtube for this but with the nature of the flagging and the censorship some may want to opt for services like mixcloud instead where you are not liable to shoot down your whole channel just for finding out the name of that one track you dig.
If you wish to identify the names for music in a video you could easily use services like https://www.4kdownload.com or http://convert2mp3.net/en/
Use these to extract the sound track of the video in mp3, then upload that to mixcloud on private settings.
I have done this here extracting the mp3 of a live set on youtube with 4kdownloader, then uploaded the mp3 to mixcloud and as you can see here we see the track names listed after about 19 minutes of automatic processing of the file. Mind blown!
After I had searched an entire week for the name of a specific track in a set I liked without any success I can't tell you how mindblowing it was to stumble upon this hack and how well it works for psytrance. If you have a recording of a track you love but could never figure out its name, this may be your best chance - especially if you don't have a smartphone or fancy apps ;)
Try it out! <3
unsplash.com
unsplash.com
mixcloud.com