HOW TO FIND A MUSIC VIDEO BY DESCRIBING IT
You are watching a video on YouTube and a catchy song is playing in the background. You want to find the song in this video, but how do you determine which music it is?
Identifying certain pieces of music is easy, while others require a little more persistence. Follow our walkthrough to find the music in any YouTube video you watch.
1. Check the video description
The first step is the easiest, but it’s the one that many people overlook. You will often see credits for copyrighted music in video descriptions. YouTube automatically adds this information when it detects licensed music. This is part of the Content ID system which allows copyright owners to claim their intellectual property on YouTube.
So your first stop should be the video description area. Click Show more to see the full description. Then scroll down and you’ll find a section called Music in this video.
This will show the song’s name, artist, and other information. If the track is available on YouTube, click on it to go to that song.
Videos that use multiple songs will list multiple tracks here. However, they don’t always appear in the correct order, so you’ll have to listen to them to find out which one you liked.
2. Search the song lyrics on Google
Don’t worry if you can’t find the track by the above method. If the music has lyrics, you don’t need a Shazam for YouTube or anything like that. Just listen carefully to the words in the song and Google a line or two.
Most of the time, this will easily identify the song name and artist and display a video or other information. If it doesn’t find anything, try the same search on Find Music by Lyrics. This engine is powered by Google, but it adjusts some parameters to focus on music content. This makes it a better YouTube song finder for our purposes.
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The main problem with this method is that it ignores covers. Many movie trailers, for example, use covers of well-known songs. If you listen to a bit of the result and it doesn’t sound like what you heard in the video, don’t worry. Once you know the title of the song, try to search for it along with additional information, such as the title of the movie.
Alternatively, you can try to search for the song title plus “cover” and see what comes up. If you are lucky, there will only be a few covers of the song, so you can easily choose your favorite song.
3. Look for comments (or ask)
Everyone loves finding new music, so there’s a good chance you won’t be the first onlooker to wonder what song is in this video. Read or search the YouTube comments and you might just stumble upon the question and its answer.
You can try the old method first. First, scroll down the page for a while so that some of the comments load. Then press Ctrl + F (or Cmd + F on a Mac) to open the Find box. Type a song and scroll through comments that use the word.
Whether it helps you find the song in a YouTube video depends on the number and quality of comments, so it may not always work.
A better way is the YTComment Finder site. While not particularly neat, the page allows you to search for comments on any YouTube video. Just enter the URL of the video you want to search for and then click Find this video under its entry.
From there, type the song (or other keywords) and you’ll see all of the related comments. If none of the comments mention it, click Show relies on someone’s comment to hope to find the answer in a reply.
If you can’t find anything, you can try leaving a comment asking for help identifying the music. Don’t be surprised if you get some “Darude – Sandstorm” comments when you ask this question.
4. Use a music Identification App
At this point, you might be wondering how to Shazam a video to identify the music inside. It turns out that you can often do just that to analyze the music in a YouTube video. There are also browser extensions that specialize in identifying songs used in YouTube videos.
1. AHA Music (Chrome)
ACRCloud offers a few music identification tools on its website. The free Chrome extension is the easiest way to find a song in a YouTube video, which is worth installing if you’re still stumped.
Start playing the video with the song you want to tag and then click on the Chrome extension icon. It will try to identify the song used in the video. Once it lists the song, you can use the shortcuts it provides to open the song in various music services.
In addition, AHA Music keeps a log of all the songs it has identified, so that you can easily search for past tracks again.
Download: AHA Music for Chrome (Free)
2. Shazam (mobile)
As we mentioned, if you are wondering how to shazam a video, the answer is clear. Shazam is one of the best music identification apps, and it works great for identifying music in YouTube videos. You will need to download the app to your mobile phone, but you can use it to analyze music from your desktop speakers.
When watching a video on your computer, launch Shazam on your phone. Hold the phone close to your speakers when the song starts playing and Shazam will identify it shortly after you ask it to search.
If you want to search for a song from a video playing on your phone, you can use Pop-Up mode on Android or Auto Shazam on iOS.
On Android, first, go to Shazam> Library> Settings> Shazam Pop-up and enable it. Then go back to your video and start playing it. When the song you want to tag starts, press and hold the Shazam floating button. Shazam will identify the song and you will finally know what it is.
If you are an iPhone owner, you cannot control Pop-Up Mode. Instead, you need to press and hold the Shazam button on the main app screen to activate Auto Shazam. This will identify the music playing around you, even if other apps are open. Just open YouTube and play the video you want to tag.
Download: Shazam for Android | iOS (Free)
5. Ask the experts on a forum
If the above methods didn’t all identify your song on YouTube, you are left with only one option. You have to ask someone else and hope they know what it is. Fortunately, the Internet has forums and communities that focus on unmasking hard-to-identify songs.
These are three great places to start:
- / r / NameThatSong (Reddit)
- / r / TipOfMyTongue (Reddit)
- Music group identification (Facebook)
You will need a Reddit or Facebook account to post to these groups. If that’s a problem for you, check out dedicated music ID communities like WatZatSong instead.
Each of these forums assumes that you have already tried the above options and failed. So make sure you’ve done your due diligence first. To make it easier for people, you have to use the YouTube URL trick which allows you to link to the part of the video where the music starts. Pause the video at the correct point, then right-click and choose Copy Video URL to Current Time.
The clearer your question, the better your chances of getting a quick and accurate answer.
Here are some more YouTube URL tips for you to check out.
6. Find out which song is in this YouTube video
Hope you can use these steps to find the music in any YouTube video. With the wealth of information on the Internet, it is likely that you will find it before too long.
And if you like to use YouTube, here’s how to edit YouTube for a better experience.
7. How To Find a Music Video by Describing It – In Easy Steps:
- Just Type a few Lyrics Into Google.
- Search on YouTube.
- Ask on a Reddit or Quora.
- Use Google Advanced Search.
- Identify with Song Identifier Apps (Find On GooglePlay Or App Store).
- Search in Artist’s Directory.
