· CueID
How to find out what songs were played on a radio show or podcast
Radio shows and music podcasts rarely publish full tracklists. Here’s how to identify every song in an episode, with the time it was played.
Plenty of the best music radio ends up as a podcast: specialist shows, mix series, club residencies. Few of them come with a full tracklist, and the ones that do often list tracks without saying when they were played. If you heard something forty minutes in, you’re left scrubbing back and forth with Shazam open.
Use the podcast feed, not a recording
If the show is published as a podcast, you don’t need to record anything. Podcast feeds link to the actual audio file of each episode, so an app can download it and work through the whole thing.
In CueID, search Apple Podcasts for the show, pick an episode, and scan it. CueID downloads the episode from the publisher, listens through it section by section, and asks Shazam to identify each one. Only a short acoustic fingerprint is sent for matching, not the audio itself.
You end up with a tracklist with the time each song starts, plus artwork and an Apple Music link.
Follow the shows you listen to every week
If it’s a show you never miss, follow it. New episodes appear in CueID and you can scan each one with a tap, or turn on Scan New Episodes Automatically and CueID scans each new one whenever it’s open. You can also watch a folder, so recordings you save there are scanned once they’ve finished being written.
Listening live
If the show is on the radio right now, open Listen and hold your phone near the speaker. CueID names each track as it plays and keeps the time it came in, so you end up with the same timestamped tracklist without a recording at all.
Talk, jingles and the bits in between
A radio show isn’t a continuous mix, and that’s fine. The sections where the presenter is talking won’t match anything, so they’re simply marked as unidentified. Tracks that aren’t in Shazam’s catalogue, like unreleased promos or white labels, are marked the same way. You can play any section to check it, retry it, or type in the track if you know it.
Not a podcast?
If the show is only on YouTube, SoundCloud or Mixcloud, CueID can’t fetch it, because those links don’t point to a downloadable file. If you have the audio as a file (MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC or AIFF) you can drop that in instead, or paste a Dropbox or Google Drive share link to one.
Then what?
Turn the tracklist into an Apple Music playlist, copy it as plain text, or export it to Rekordbox or Traktor if you’re digging for tracks to play yourself. Your first scan is free, however long the episode.