For anyone in this position, don't forget !tipofmytongue@lemmy.world - maybe someone can help identify what you're after.

On the Other place, one of my favourite time killers was to go through the various subs devoted to identifying music/movies/books/etc based on small clips, screenshots or even just descriptions.

Don't think there are equivalents on Lemmy, but TipOfMyTongue can kind of serve that purpose :-)

Was a song I hadn't heard for well over a decade. Bought a Blu-ray player from a thrift store. Whoever got rid of it forgot to sign out of Pandora, which was pre installed on it alongside some Blockbuster program of all things. Ended up using the account because I figured nobody would care (otherwise the original account owner(s) might try to unlink the account from the device if possible) and the song randomly came on. Happened maybe almost a year ago.

It was The Middle by Jimmy Eat World.

A song evaded me for maybe 5 or 6 years once. I ended up having this same conversation about evasive songs with someone and did my best at an impression, because it's instrumental.

"Doo-d' Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo, Doo-d' Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo..."

The person I was talking to instantly said it was Eple - Röyksopp, and was entirely correct.

I remember listening to a metal song while I played my Xbox 360 back when i was in high school. Even back then I never knew the title since I stole it from my sister's computer. Recently I've been racking my head against the wall trying to find it again and I kept googling one lyric I remember but it coming up as Purple Rain by Prince which was way off from the songs genre. I tried everything from trying to recreate the song on the piano, asking friends, googling and more googling. Eventually I just gave up until I watched a youtube video about metal songs without the metal. And, by PURE COINCIDENCE the song was in the video.

It was Walk by Pantera.

https://youtu.be/eS2mfeo-Ues

I ended up having to recreate it from memory in a DAW and used Google Assistant to identify it

Old rave music mixtapes.

I had a tape labeled as “sluggo vs urban: annihilation” that I simply loved to death. The tapes are long gone and I never found the artists/DJs again.

My main electronic music growing up was Hard-Trance and then DnB, but we had a friend who DJed House/Big Beat and he would drop this feelgood banger that would get us smiling.

Lost the name of it for about 7 years before someone knew what I was talking about, then I forgot the name for about another 10 years before getting it again.

Will never forget it now.

Tune was only known to us as the 'RingKingKing song' Link here

I remember hearing this song all the time on the radio when I was younger, of course I started hearing it less and less. After probably 7 or 8 years of not hearing the song once I caught the very end of it on a rock radio station. I was like "oh wow I remember this song". I tried to Shazam it but it ended right then, and I didn't know any of the lyrics. I tried humming it to my brother, no dice.

Probably a year or two later I hear it on the radio again (my local radio kinda stinks so I don't listen often). "Oh shit this is it". Go to Shazam it, song ends. "Fuck". This happened no joke like two or three more times over the next year or two, but then I finally got it: No one knows - Queens of the Stone Age

14 years ago when I was still relatively young and liked clubbing, a song popped up and swept all the playlists in my country. Clubs, radio stations, you name it. Catchy French song. It came and went so fast that I didn't manage to memorise it. That was long before I even dreamed of having a smartphone. When I moved to UK a year later, nobody had any idea what song I'm trying to describe, like they never heard it.

Probably around 8 years ago I was roaming the streets of Porto with my ex, and a shop we passed had the song blasting from the speakers. Praise the smartphones, I used 'what's the song' app and et voila: Stromae - alors on danse

Sorry, still looking. 30 years.

There's a Kiwi reggae band called Fat Freddy's Drop, and I got the mp3s of their first album Based on a True Story from a friend not too long after it came out. Later I lost them on an old HD, and when I went to get the album again most of the songs were different versions, and noticeably worse than what I remember. I've been able to track down a few of the old versions over the years but not all of them.

Part of the difficulty is not knowing what the versions I first heard were. They didn't sound live so it's not as simple as trying to find concert versions. Trying to find a specific version of a song can be more frustrating than not knowing what a song is entirely :/

It took me like a million years to find Brainbug - Nightmare (Sinister Strings Mix) because I had only heard it in a oddball movie trailer and the song wasn't used anywhere in the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByV9eCikkaU

If I knew enough about it to describe it in a comment, I wouldn't have trouble searching for it.

When I was a kid in 1992/93, I'd listen to the local hip-hop station. They're play house music at night and there'd be a track that would come up that was super catchy. Being the early 90s, and late night radio of just hour long mixed music, they'd never call out the song title and there's was no internet to look it up on a playlist or something. It also didn't help that the song was basically nonsensical lyrics, so describing the song by it's lyrics was pretty worthless. Though I did try to look for it through the years, I never had much luck. It was so strange to me that a seemingly popular song just disappeared like that.

At some point in the late 2000s, I managed to discover a forum that specialized in identifying songs. I happened to have a recording of the song on cassette from the days I'd sit by the radio with my thumb on the record button for when my favorite songs would come up. I uploaded a small clip of it for them to identify it. A few days later after some incorrectly identified songs, someone says, "Nightcrawlers- Push the Feeling On". Damn! I was elated! I looked it up on YouTube and there it was, with a music video too! I was very happy that day.

Isn't there a way to find songs by inputting a melody? I thought that was a thing...

ETA: yes, it is a thing on several sites: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=find+song+by+melody&ia=web

"Something something, hot hot (?) ta da da, something something, hot hoooooot"

Has been stuck in my head for months now!

(By the way, "something" is always the same word, song from the 80s/90s I think, just in case there's someone that can help 😂)

When I was a young teen, one of my friends gave me a floppy disk of midi song files she liked a lot but they mostly had names like "ANIME 2" so I had no idea where they came from. There was one on there I was particularly obsessed with but could never find. Then one serendipitous day, I did. It was The Destruction of Laputa from Castle in the Sky.

Edit: Or it was Sora from Escaflowne. There's been a few times I heard an instrumental or non-English song with no source to go off of.

I had the tune to Men of Harlech stuck in my head for almost 20 years, then I randomly watched a video about Wales that used it, and I was able to make the connection from there.

There was a song that played on the radio a really long time ago, I remember that someone had requested it, and I remember how it sounded, but not any of the lyrics. It sounded really heavenly, a woman with a highish voice was singing, and the song sounded really old fashioned but also kind of new at the same time. It sounded like nothing that would've played on the station it was playing on, it was actually kinda jarring in the best way possible. I wish I could find it!

The best way I can describe it is that it had a really similar vibe to Les Fleur by Minnie Riperton, particularly the quieter parts. The singer would end their vocals in an "ahh" kind of sound.

I been trying to find one for a while. Its from a metal band and may be on a relatively new abum. I tried search, ai, looking though history and can't for the life of me find anything past a fragment of lyrics I can vaugly understand. I think IRS from a rather mainstream band but not one I'm familiar enough with.
I don't remember enough and most of its hard to understand the lyrics are close in sound but likely wrong AF.

Screaming:
... The more i see the less i feel. Reminding my self it not real...(no not Slipknot but its very similar sound to that lyric but Slipknot overwritten what I remembered since its sounds so damn close)

A slower section of the song, a whispery voice sings something along the lines of:

"...can you feel me from the side lines, friend"

May have been ~can you see me in the (spotlight or distance) friend.

A techno mix made with Super Mario bros. from the early 2000s most likely from Napster or Kazaa. It wasn't a melody from any of the Mario games, but it was constructed with sounds from it.

There's this one blues song that had a line about a "sweet little thing" by a guy down in Louisiana doing this southern rock style blues. I liked the song in a situationship that ended weird, quit using the streaming service I discovered the song with, and now I can't remember enough to find it.

Edit:

Years ago, I downloaded a relaxed-tempo, acoustic version of "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters, that was fantastic. I lost it when my stupid, proprietary NAS decided to re-initialize both RAID disks. I've searched repeatedly, but all that ever comes up is Dave Grohl's solo performance on The Howard Stern Show.

Also Conquest of Paradise for me! I had the tune randomly pop up in my head for well over a decade, probably close to two, without having any idea what it was. Every few years I tried finding out what it was, but to no avail. Online melody searches weren't that good, and when I hummed the melody to people or played it on the piano, people either had no clue or, at best, were like "that sounds familiar but I have no idea what it is". I even toyed with the idea that I had come up with the melody myself, though I did find it unlikely.

I can't describe the happiness I felt when I finally discovered the actual song when I once again tried finding it, this time by humming into Google's music search thing

She's a Star by James. The only part I could remember was the "star" part of the chorus, which is not exactly an easy lyric to decipher when you hear it on a supermarket radio. Eventually I found it by buying a James CD and running into that track by chance

A pretty famous song from the 80s. I only remember the intro, which sounds similar to the intro of "Take my breath away" by "Berlin". Just a bass, going Dum Dum - Dum Dum. I know nothing else, not even if the singer is male or female. Tried to find it a few times, no luck.

Usually some soul-jazz post-bop joint but I can never figure out if it's Cannonball Adderley or Lee Morgan.

I had one like that a while back. I'd heard the song on Pandora a few times and liked it, but it was just background music while i was working. The tune was catchy, but I couldn't remember the lyrics at all. I tried humming it into sound hound and stuff, but to no avail.

Finally my wife was playing Pandora when I came home from work and it was on.

Welcome Home, Son - Radical Face

Back in the late nineties I had the reverse problem. I heard a cover of Bakers Street by the Foo Fighters on an independent radio station. I knew it was from a Japanese version of The Colour and the Shape, but no one had the CD. (Actually it was the UK version of the single My Hero, but either I misheard or the DJ was wrong. No wonder I couldn't find it.) Then, Napster happened. I've still got that song somewhere on an old HDD, in all its 128 Kbps glory

"Sol Clap" by Quantic

Came up in my Spotify suggested and I was like "I know this song!"

I still haven't found a british 80's rock song that had a pretty popular music video about a kid that grows up into a punk and disapoints his parents. "get on off to school, your son will grow up to be a fool" "hey mama, hey papa, im 19 now. handsome tall and strong" "why the hell do you look at me as if to say what went wrong". have used search and it was one of the things I did to test the limits of ai awhile back. I should check to see if the new chatbot versions can do better.

Not a song per say. But vague over used band names.

I'm really into synthwave right now and there are two artists I want to listen to. 1. Victim 2. Anne.

Good luck searching for these artists.

Took me years to find Ievan polkka