How To Identify Music?

Winged-Scarab

New member
This may be a shot in the dark, but it can't hurt to ask. When I first started dancing, I purchased a student CD from my teacher to practice the choreography at home. I also planned to put the tracks on my mp3 player so I could have better access to the music (because the CD player in my car doesn't like to work). However, my OCD gets the better of me here because the files have no metadata. Therefore I don't know the song titles or who performed them. I don't put anything on my mp3 player without meticulously filling out the metadata myself and making sure everything is correct. I keep my music very organized. I have tried playing the tracks and using Sony's TrackID app to identify the songs (it usually does well, even with foreign music), but it can't tell me anything. A few tracks have lyrics, but the rest are instrumentals. Does anyone know any other way I could identify this music?
 

Winged-Scarab

New member
I thought about temporarily uploading the files here to see if anyone could listen to them and tell me if they know what they are. But I don't know how to upload a sound file for preview on here.
 

Daimona

Moderator
Ah.. the classic challenge of no-title-of-music-for-practice-compilations.
You're not the first one to search for music IDs on this forum (and probably not the last as long as those making these compilations continues to ditch the data and metadata).


If you don't have a large archive of music, ask someone for help.
I did it some years ago, and got a lot of help here. I only posted 30s of each song (or so) and removed the file & edited the post (including replacing the link) as soon as I knew the title & artist. Anything you may have of information may help in the search, even if it is just the length of the original song.

You cannot upload audio files to the forum, but if you find somewhere else to upload them temporarily you can post a link to them here.


As a side-note to the search of song IDs - I'm fascinated of how some teachers always stress that their students should give credit when using their choreographies, but forget to give the same credit to those artists and composers they build their art work upon themselves. But this is a topic for a separate thread, not this thread.
 

Winged-Scarab

New member
Thanks for the link! I'll give that a try. As for editing my sound files, my laptop is old and the only program that I have on it that could have done that is a video editor that crashes every time I try to save, so I won't be able to clip the songs. I'll look for something light to download that my laptop can handle and try seeing if my google drive can host the files until I no longer need them. Thanks for your suggestion!
 

Daimona

Moderator
Thanks for the link! I'll give that a try. As for editing my sound files, my laptop is old and the only program that I have on it that could have done that is a video editor that crashes every time I try to save, so I won't be able to clip the songs. I'll look for something light to download that my laptop can handle and try seeing if my google drive can host the files until I no longer need them. Thanks for your suggestion!

See this thread for links to audio editing software: http://bellydanceforums.net/threads/14178-Music-editing-software
 

Roshanna

New member
Shazam is great for anything that's part of the mainstream music economy (so, most Arabic pop etc), but it won't pick up stuff from CDs self-produced by dancers. But at least if Shazam won't ID it, that tells you it may be from a self-produced CD, which may be useful info in itself.
 

Darshiva

Moderator
Soundhound is another great app and it has good results identifying even some obscure tracks. I spent a good 3 hours with it tonight and there were maybe 3 songs that stumped it. (I'm STILLsorting music from cds and random storage after my laptop was stolen 18 months ago)
 

Farasha Hanem

New member
Soundhound is another great app and it has good results identifying even some obscure tracks. I spent a good 3 hours with it tonight and there were maybe 3 songs that stumped it. (I'm STILLsorting music from cds and random storage after my laptop was stolen 18 months ago)


I totally agree with Darshiva on SoundHound, and have had much better luck with it over the years than I have any other music ID app.
 
Top