I remember a song that still rings in my mind to this day and I remember watching it way back when MuchMusic existed on cable in my country. I just don’t know the lyrics, I don’t know the band. The only vivid thing I remember was parts of it’s music video and I tried going off on that.

With the way search engines are today, it’s hard to find results when all you’ve got is vague details. It sucks even more when you know exactly what you’re talking about but the search engine drags in irrelevant contexts to what you’re looking for.

I was only ever once able to find another seemingly lost track I heard of that I also only knew the sound but nothing of the lyrics or band. The only way I found that was through a lyric site, that I also forgot about. It was this industrial song that turned out to be ‘War’ by Wumpscut.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Early 00’s I used to listen to my brothers playlist on Windows Media Player. One of the songs was a gloomy/trance(?) remix of classical music. He had named it (something) Beethoven mix.

On multiple occasions I tried searching for it. Both the mix and the original song to make the search easier. But since I’m not at home with classical music I couldn’t figure out either of them. Not sure if it even was one of Beethovens pieces.

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

“Sol Clap” by Quantic

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