· CueID

How to turn a DJ mix into an Apple Music playlist

Heard a mix you love and want every track in your library? Here’s how to go from one long recording to an Apple Music playlist in the right order.

A good mix is a great way to find new music, but it’s a frustrating way to keep it. The tracks are welded together, and by the time you’ve paused to look one up, you’ve missed the next. What you really want is the whole set as a playlist, so you can save the tracks you like and listen to them properly.

Step 1: get the tracklist

First you need to know what’s in the mix, and where. CueID listens through the whole recording and identifies each track with Shazam. You can bring a mix in three ways:

  • An audio file you already have: MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC or AIFF (plus WebM on Mac).
  • A Dropbox or Google Drive share link to a file someone has posted.
  • A podcast episode. Search Apple Podcasts for the show inside the app and pick the episode.

YouTube, SoundCloud and Mixcloud links won’t work, because those sites don’t give you a downloadable file. If the mix is also published as a podcast, which many radio shows and mix series are, that’s usually the easiest route.

When the scan finishes you’ll have a tracklist with artwork, timestamps and a confidence rating for each match. There’s more on how that works in how to get a tracklist for a DJ mix.

Step 2: check the gaps

Before you make the playlist, look over anything marked as unidentified. Unreleased edits and bootlegs often aren’t in Shazam’s catalogue. You can play the section in the app, retry it, or type the track in yourself if you know it. Anything that isn’t on Apple Music obviously can’t go in the playlist, but it stays in your tracklist.

Step 3: build the playlist

Choose Add to Apple Music under the tracklist. CueID asks for access to Apple Music the first time, then searches the catalogue and adds a playlist to your library with everything it found, in the order it was played.

From there it’s an ordinary playlist. Download it, shuffle it, or prune it down to the tracks you’ll actually want again.

A few tips

  • Follow a mix series. If you like a show, follow it from the podcast search in CueID and scan each new episode with a tap, or have new episodes scanned automatically.
  • Keep the library. Every scan is saved, synced through iCloud and searchable by set or by track, so “what was that track in last month’s show?” has an answer — the search takes you straight to the moment it played.
  • It’s free to try. Your first scan is free whatever its length, and making playlists is included.