Track ID From a Screenshot

There are two completely different problems people both call “track ID”, and they need different tools.

The first: you can hear a track but nobody has named it. A DJ drops something unreleased at 34:12 and there is no tracklist anywhere. That is an audio problem, and it is the one Shazam and the DJ mix analysers try to solve.

The second: the tracklist already exists, as text, inside an image. Nothing needs identifying. The information is right there. It just is not clickable, not searchable, and not a playlist.

This page is about the second problem, which is the one PHASE: RADAR was built for.

When a screenshot is the fastest route

In all four cases an audio analyser has nothing to work with, because there is no audio file. The set is already documented in writing.

Why generic text extraction is not enough

Any modern phone can already pull text out of an image. The reason that is not sufficient for a DJ tracklist is that these track names carry structure, and plain extraction flattens it:

04. Peverelist - Roll With The Punches (Batu Remix) [Livity Sound]

Generic OCR hands you that string. What you actually need is five separate fields, because a remix is a different recording from the original — searching for “Roll With The Punches” without “Batu Remix” returns the wrong track, every time. Labels matter for the same reason: they are frequently the only way to tell two identically titled records apart.

That parsing is the actual work. PHASE: RADAR reads the image, separates position, artist, title, mix name and label per line, and then resolves each track against YouTube and Spotify — so what comes out is a playlist you can press play on, not a block of text you still have to process by hand.

When you should use an audio tool instead

Be honest about which problem you actually have. If there is no tracklist anywhere and you only have the audio, a screenshot tool cannot help you, because there is nothing to read. Your real options there:

• Audio fingerprinting (Shazam, SoundHound). Works when a track plays mostly solo and close to its original pitch and tempo — usually at the very start or end of a blend. It fails on layered or heavily pitched sections, because the fingerprint no longer matches the original recording.
• Mix analysers. Several services now take a YouTube or SoundCloud URL and return a timestamped tracklist. Accuracy varies considerably by genre and by how heavily the tracks were processed in the mix.
• Communities. r/trackID and genre-specific Discords still resolve IDs that no algorithm gets, particularly unreleased material and dubplates. Someone who owns the record beats fingerprinting every time.

Those are different tools for a genuinely different job. Use them when that is the job.

Getting a scan that parses cleanly

When a screenshot comes back badly parsed, it is almost always one of three things:

• Resolution too low. Screenshot at full size rather than photographing a screen. If you are capturing a video overlay, pause first — motion blur destroys small text.
• Heavy stylisation. Condensed all-caps display faces over a busy background are hard for anything to read. Where a set list exists as both a designed poster and a plain list, use the plain one.
• Cropped mid-line. A label or remix credit cut off at the edge of the frame cannot be recovered afterwards.

Accepted formats are JPEG, PNG and WebP, up to 10 MB.