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

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

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

Sorry, still looking. 30 years.

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

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 :/

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.

“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 😂)