How to make a tracklist for a DJ mix

The manual method is to play your own mix back, pause at every transition, write down the time on the transport, and type it next to the track. For a ninety-minute set with twenty tracks that is a genuinely unpleasant evening, and one mistake near the start shifts nothing else — you simply have to be accurate twenty times.

It is worth describing only because it is what most people do, and because everything below exists to avoid it.

rekordbox, Traktor and Serato all record what they played and when, without being asked. rekordbox writes a cue sheet next to every recording; Traktor keeps a History playlist for each session; Serato saves a session to its own History.

Any of those is already a timestamped tracklist. Nothing was marked up during the set, nothing needed planning, and the timings come from what actually happened rather than from someone's memory of it. This is the easiest route by a distance, and it needs no DAW at all.

In Ableton Live or FL Studio, the equivalent is a marker at each transition, named with the track. You are placing them anyway to find your way around a long arrangement, so naming them properly is the only extra work — and it happens while you are building, when you know exactly what the track is.

The project file then holds both the position and the name of every transition, which is everything a tracklist needs.

YouTube is the fussy one: chapters only appear if the first entry starts at 0:00, there are at least three, and none is shorter than ten seconds. Break any of those and the list silently stays ordinary text.

SoundCloud and Mixcloud are more forgiving and take a plain time-and-title list in the description. Mixcloud also has its own tracklist field, which matters for how a mix is credited.

For a video edit rather than a description box, times with tenths or milliseconds are more useful than whole seconds, and a CSV or JSON export saves whatever reads it from parsing a clock string.