Getting a playlist out of Serato's History panel

History sits with the other browser tabs above the library, next to Files and Browse. It lists one row per session, filed by date, and expanding a row shows the tracks played in it.

A night is not always one row. Serato starts a new session when it restarts, so a set played either side of a crash, a laptop swap or a long break is filed as two, and Export takes only the session you have selected. The track count on the row is the quickest check: twelve tracks against a three-hour night means the rest is under a second row.

Serato offers a plain text file, a CSV and an .m3u playlist. The .m3u is a list of file paths for other software to load, carrying at most each file's own length and nothing about the night you played them in. The text file is written to be read by a person. The CSV is the one this page reads, and the one to choose.

Start time is a column like any other, and an export can arrive without it. The usual cause is that it was not switched on in the session view, and nothing points that out at the time. Check it is showing before you export, then glance at the file afterwards — artist, song and bpm with no clock anywhere is what a missing column looks like.

The start time column holds a time of day — 10:32:15 PM — rather than a position in the mix. A tracklist needs the second thing, so the first track's clock time becomes 0:00 and every row after it is measured from there. A start time written with seconds is read to the second; one written as hours and minutes alone can only land on the top of the minute.

It also means the list is measured from your first track, not from the first frame of your recording. If the upload opens with a minute of room noise before the first track lands, every entry is a minute early. The rows are editable on the results page, so that is a correction rather than another trip back to Serato.

The expensive mistake here is a tidy one. Dragging the tracks out of a session into a crate is a reasonable way to keep a good set together, and a crate has nowhere to record when anything was played, so the times stay behind in History the moment the tracks are moved. Export the session first, then tidy.

What a crate export gives you is names in the order you filed them, which reads convincingly enough that people paste it into a description box and estimate times against it. There is nothing there to recover, because no clock was ever written into it.

Serato wrote the session to disk while it played, and that file can be dropped here as it is, with no columns to get wrong. Exporting earns its place when the set has to go somewhere other than here — a spreadsheet to sort, a label report, a submission form — or when a session file will not open. Those two files are what this page reads from Serato; an .m3u and a crate are not, because neither holds a time. Both are read by code in your own browser, nothing is uploaded, and there is no account.