What does "ID" mean in a tracklist?

Why DJ tracklists say "ID - ID", what an ID track is, how to find out what it was, and where the answers come from when no app knows.

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Open any tracklist on 1001Tracklists or in a YouTube comment section and you will see rows that just say ID - ID, or Fred again.. - ID, or ID - ID (Amelie Lens edit). Nothing is broken. "ID" is DJ shorthand for a track that has not been identified yet: someone heard it, wrote down where it played, and left the name open because nobody knows it.

The three kinds of ID

  • ID - ID: neither the artist nor the title is known. Usually an unreleased track, a dubplate that only exists on one USB stick, or an obscure record nobody in the comments recognised.
  • Artist - ID: the artist is known (often because the DJ is playing their own material), the title is not. Very common in Boiler Room and festival sets where producers test new music.
  • ID (something): a known track in an unknown form: an edit, a bootleg, a remix that was never released. The original is named, the version is not.

The phrase comes from the question people shout at the booth and type under the video: "ID?", short for "identify this". A tracklist that still contains IDs is a tracklist with open questions, and filling them in is a sport of its own.

Why so many tracks stay ID

Music recognition apps match a recording against a database of released tracks. A track that was never released is not in any database, so Shazam, SoundHound and every fingerprint engine draw a blank, however clean the recording is. That covers most of the IDs in a modern techno or house set: promos that are months from release, private edits, and tools the DJ made for that set.

The second reason is the mix itself. A DJ plays records faster or slower than released and blends two of them for a minute at a time. A one-shot app that hears ten seconds of a pitched, layered section often gives up even on a released track. That is not an ID in the strict sense, just a gap in the tool.

How to find out what an ID was

  1. Read the comments and the description. On YouTube and SoundCloud the timed comments are the first place an ID gets solved. Search the page for "ID" and the timestamp.
  2. Search the tracklist sites. 1001Tracklists collects the crowd's answers per set; an ID solved there is marked with the name and the date it was confirmed.
  3. Run the whole set through a set identifier. ryser.id analyses the full recording rather than a snippet, corrects for tempo shifts and blends, and returns every track it can name with its timestamp. What it cannot name stays honestly marked as unknown, at the right time, so you know exactly which minutes are still open.
  4. Ask the people who were there. On a public ryser.id set other DJs can suggest an ID for an unknown row, and votes decide whether it sticks. A confirmed answer is remembered, so the next set that plays the same record gets the name automatically.
  5. Ask the DJ. Many answer under their own upload, especially for their own unreleased material, once a release date exists.

When an ID gets released

An ID does not stay an ID forever. Most unreleased tracks in big sets come out within three to nine months, and the tracklist sites update the row when they do. If you keep a set on ryser.id, a track that was unknown when you analysed it can be recognised on a re-run once it exists in the recognition databases, and any crowd answer on a public set carries over.

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