It happens more often than we'd like to admit: we're watching a YouTube video, and the creator uses a snippet of a song that immediately catches our attention. The video description doesn't give the title, and no one in the comments comes to the rescue—or worse, people ask who it is and get no answer. If the lyrics don't appear on Google (assuming it has lyrics) and Shazam falls short in identifying that YouTube song, maybe the service QiiQoo can help.
How to identify a YouTube song
Finding the title of a song on YouTube is one of the most frustrating (and at the same time rewarding) tasks we can take on. The first step is to pick a part of the lyrics and run it through Google's engine, but there are always those cases where the language sounds too "closed off." Personally, I've confused "downtown" with "right now," and imagine what an error like that does to the results. If we have an Android or iOS device (I say "device" because we only need something with a microphone), one of the most popular alternatives is to download Shazam (which we recommend in this guide to find out the name of songs), which can surprise us with its speed and accuracy, or completely disappoint us when it doesn't recognize the song. However, there's a third "nuclear option," and it's called QiiQoo.
The nuclear option: QiiQoo
The idea is that we paste the video URL with the song we want to identify, hit the search button, and in a few seconds the result appears. QiiQoo works in both mobile and desktop browsers, and fortunately it has no external dependencies. Now, why do I call it a "nuclear option"? To be honest, its behavior can be quite erratic. QiiQoo suggests a video "with 10 or 20 seconds" of the song to identify, but it doesn't support the start and end tags that you put in URLs, and it's very easy to get a "limit exceeded" error. QiiQoo also doesn't tell you what that limit is, and its advice is to download the video, manually cut 10 or 20 seconds, and then upload it using the upload feature.
In summary, QiiQoo isn't perfect, but if you urgently need to know the name of a YouTube song and everything else has failed, maybe QiiQoo will hit the mark. I hope the service adds additional parameters in the future to process videos. Support for start and end tags would be very useful, and would prevent the whole download, edit, and upload process.
