You’re watching a video on YouTube, and it has a catchy song playing in the background. You want to find the song from this video, but how do you figure out what music it is?
Identifying some music tracks is easy, while others require a little more persistence. Follow our step-by-step walkthrough to find the music in any YouTube video you watch.
1. Check the Video’s Description
The first step is the easiest, but it’s one that many people overlook. You’ll often see credits for copyrighted music in video descriptions. YouTube adds this information automatically when it detects licensed music. This is part of the Content ID system that allows copyright owners to claim their intellectual property on YouTube.
Thus, your first stop should be the video’s description box. Click Show More to see the whole description. Then, scroll down and you’ll find a section called Music in this video.
This will show the song’s name, artist, and some other information. If the track is available on YouTube, clicking it will take you to that song.
Videos that use multiple songs will list multiple tracks here. However, they don’t always appear in the right order, so you’ll have to give them a listen to figure out which one you liked.
2. Search for the Song Lyrics on Google
Don’t worry if you can’t find the track through the above method. If the music has lyrics, you don’t need a Shazam for YouTube or anything like that. Simply listen carefully for the words to the song, and search for a line or two of them on Google.
Most of the time, this will easily identify the song name, artist, and even bring up a video or further information. If it doesn’t find anything, try the same search on Find Music By Lyrics. This engine is powered by Google, but it tweaks some settings to focus on musical content. This makes it a better YouTube song finder for our purposes.
The main problem with this method is that it doesn’t account for 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 song title, try searching for that plus some additional information, such as the movie title.
Failing that, you can try searching for the song title plus “cover” and seeing what comes up. If you’re lucky, there will only be a few covers of the song, making it easy to pick your favorite out.
3. Search the Comments (or Ask)
Everyone likes finding new music, so there’s a good chance you aren’t the first viewer wondering what song is in that video. Read or search through the YouTube comments and you might just come across the question and its answer.
You can try the old-fashioned way first. Begin by scrolling down on the page for a moment so that some of the comments load. Then press Ctrl + F (or Cmd + F on a Mac) to open the Find box. Type song, and scroll through the comments that use the word.
Whether this helps you find the song in a YouTube video depends on the number and quality of comments, so it might not always work.
A better way is the dedicated YTComment Finder site. While it’s not particularly polished, the page allows you to search the comments of any YouTube video. Simply enter the URL of the video you want to search, then click Search this video underneath its entry.
From there, type song (or another keyword) and you’ll see all of the matching comments. If none of the comments mention it, click View replies on someone’s comment to hopefully find the answer in a response.
If you don’t find anything, you can try leaving a comment asking for help with identifying the music. Just don’t be surprised if you get a few “Darude—Sandstorm” comments when you ask this.
4. Use a Music Identification App
At this point, you might wonder how to Shazam a video to identify the music inside. As it turns out, you can often do just that to analyze the music in a YouTube video. Alternatively, there are 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 easiest one for finding a song in a YouTube video is the free Chrome extension, which is worth installing if you’re still stumped.
Start playing the video with the song you want to identify, then click the icon of the Chrome extension. It will attempt 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.
Plus, AHA Music maintains a log of all the songs it’s identified, so you can easily look up past tracks again.
Download: AHA Music for Chrome (Free)
2. Shazam (Mobile)
As we mentioned, if you’ve been wondering how to Shazam a video, the answer is clear. Shazam is one of the best music identification apps, and it works just fine for identifying music in YouTube videos. You’ll need to download the app on your mobile phone, but you can use it to analyze music from your desktop speakers.
When you’re watching a video on your computer, fire up Shazam on your phone. Hold the phone close to your speakers when the song starts playing, and Shazam will identify it in no time after you tell it to search.
If you want to find a song from a video playing on your phone, you can use the Pop-Up mode on Android or Auto Shazam on iOS.
On Android, first go to Shazam > Library > Settings > Pop-up Shazam and enable it. Next, go back to your video and start playing it. When the song that you want to identify starts, tap and hold the floating Shazam button. Shazam will identify the song and you’ll finally know what it is.
If you’re an iPhone owner you can’t control Pop-Up mode. Instead, you should press and hold the Shazam button on the app’s main screen to turn on Auto Shazam. This will identify music playing around you, even with other apps open. Simply open YouTube and play the video you want to identify.
Download: Shazam for Android | iOS (Free)
5. Ask Experts on a Forum
If the above methods have all failed to identify your song on YouTube, you only have one option left. You need to to ask someone else and hope they know what it is. Luckily, the internet has some forums and communities that focus on unmasking hard-to-identify songs.
These are three great places to start:
- /r/NameThatSong (Reddit)
- /r/TipOfMyTongue (Reddit)
- Identification of Music Group (Facebook)
You’ll need a Reddit or Facebook account to post to these groups. If that’s an issue for you, check out dedicated music ID communities like WatZatSong instead.
Each of these forums assumes you have already tried the above options and failed, so make sure you’ve done your due diligence first. To make it easy for people, you should use the YouTube URL trick that lets you link to the part of the video where the music starts. Pause the video at the right point, then right-click and choose Copy video URL at current time.
The clearer your question is, the better your chances are of getting a quick and accurate answer.
Here are some other YouTube URL tricks to learn.
Find Out What Song Is in That YouTube Video
Hopefully, you can use these steps to find the music in any YouTube video. With the wealth of information on the internet, the chances are that you’ll find it before too long.
And if you enjoy using YouTube, here’s how to tweak YouTube for a better experience.
Read the full article: How to Identify Music and Songs in YouTube Videos
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