· CueID

How to get a tracklist for a DJ mix, with timestamps

Found a mix you love but there’s no tracklist? Here’s how to identify every song in a long recording and get the start time for each one.

You’ve got a two-hour DJ mix, a radio show or a podcast episode full of music, and nobody has posted a tracklist. Holding your phone up to the speaker and Shazaming it track by track works, but it’s slow, it misses things and it doesn’t tell you when each track starts.

Here’s the quicker way.

Why ordinary song ID struggles with mixes

Song recognition works by matching a short fingerprint of the audio against a catalogue. That’s perfect for a single track playing in a café. A mix is harder because:

  • Tracks overlap. During a transition two songs are playing at once, and the fingerprint matches neither cleanly.
  • It’s long. An hour-long set has 15–25 tracks, and you need to sample it all the way through to catch each one.
  • Timing matters. A useful tracklist says where each track comes in, not just what it is.

Scan the whole recording at once

CueID does the tedious part for you. It listens through the recording section by section, fingerprints each one on your device, and asks Shazam for a match. As it goes, it builds a tracklist with artwork, a confidence rating and an Apple Music link for every track it finds.

  1. Bring in the recording. Drop in an audio file (MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC or AIFF), paste a Dropbox or Google Drive share link, or search Apple Podcasts for the show and pick an episode.
  2. Let it run. You can queue several recordings and get a notification when each one finishes.
  3. Tighten the timestamps. CueID can narrow each start time down to the transition, so the tracklist marks where a track actually drops rather than where it was first recognised.

Your audio isn’t uploaded. Only the short acoustic fingerprint is sent for matching.

Filling the gaps

No recogniser knows every track. Unreleased edits, white labels, bootlegs and dense blends often won’t match. CueID marks those sections instead of guessing, and you can:

  • Listen to the section in the app to check it by ear,
  • Retry it, or
  • Type in the track yourself if you know it.

That last step is usually where a good tracklist comes from: the recogniser gets most of it, and you fill in the two or three tracks only a human would know.

What to do with the tracklist

Once it’s done you can turn it into an Apple Music playlist, export it as plain text or YouTube chapters, or send it to Rekordbox or Traktor. Every scan is saved in your history, searchable by set or by track.

Your first scan is free, however long the recording.