The search engine for songs you can't quite remember.
Search That Song finds music from almost any clue: a microphone recording, a hummed or sung melody, a single lyric, a misheard line, a vibe, a description, or a guess at the genre. We built it because most search engines aren't designed for the way music actually lives in our heads.
Why we built this
People don't usually remember songs the way databases store them. You don't remember the title or the year. You remember a single line that's been stuck in your head for three days, or a beat from a friend's wedding, or a chorus you heard once in a coffee shop. Typing the title into a search box doesn't help in those moments.
Sometimes you can play the song; sometimes all you can do is hum it, sing a few notes, repeat an uncertain lyric, or describe the music video. Search That Song brings those audio and text clues together instead of requiring one exact kind of input.
How it works (the short version)
Every query you type runs through a multi-stage pipeline:
- Audio and humming recognition: on mobile, a microphone clip of recorded music, singing, or humming is compared with ACRCloud's recognition catalog. Search That Song does not retain the clip.
- Lyric matching: we run your input against a vector index of millions of lyric chunks using OpenAI embeddings, so a paraphrase or a misheard line still finds the right song.
- Web reasoning: for vibe-based or descriptive queries like "90s song with whistling", we cross-reference real-time web search results and run them through a language model to pull out candidate matches.
- Audio verification: top candidates are linked to their YouTube source so you can confirm by ear in one click.
- Similar-song discovery: once you've found the song, we surface five neighbours from our embedding index that share themes, era, or feel.
The full technical breakdown is on the How it works page.
What this site is, and isn't
This site is a search and discovery tool. We index the songs people search for, surface popular ones via charts, and link out to where you can listen.
Our focus is finding the song, not archiving lyrics. Where short lyric excerpts are shown, they come from community and public sources such as LRCLIB and are credited to their rights holders, who retain all rights. If you're a rights holder and want an excerpt removed, see our Terms.
Who runs it
Search That Song is an independent project run by a single developer. There's no investor pressure, no ad-tech tracking beyond standard Google Analytics, and no plan to lock useful features behind a paywall. If you want to get in touch (feedback, a song that didn't match, a partnership idea) the contact page is the place.
Data sources we credit
We're an aggregator on top of public and community APIs. We use ACRCloud for audio and humming recognition, pull metadata from Deezer, lyric data from LRCLIB, audio links from YouTube, and lean on OpenAI for query understanding. Nothing on this site claims to originate that underlying material. Every song page links back to where it lives.