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Search guide

Everything you can do with HowLongIsThisSong.com’s search — from a plain song title to a five-filter deep dive.

The basics

Type a song title, an artist, or both. The search reads the title, artist, and album.

bohemian rhapsody
Find a song by its title.
pink floyd
Find songs by an artist.
hey jude beatles
Title and artist together.

Searching by length

This is the site’s specialty. Times use minutes:seconds, and you can add milliseconds.

3:16
Exact duration (with a small tolerance you can widen with the slider).
3:16.423
Millisecond precision.
3:00 to 4:00
A range. Also written “between 3:00 and 4:00”.
>10:00
Longer than 10 minutes.
<3:00
Shorter than 3 minutes.

Note: open-ended searches need the full time with a colon. >10:00 means “longer than 10 minutes”; >10 on its own is read as the text “10”, not a duration.

Combining words and time

Mix a keyword with a duration in one search.

love 4:20
Songs with “love” in the name that are 4:20 long.
symphony >30:00
Long pieces with “symphony” in the name.

Wildcards & whole words

By default a plain word matches the whole word (so cup finds “Cup” and “Cups”, not “Cupid”). Add * to match parts of words:

con*
Starts with “con” (Conan, Connect, Console…).
*tion
Ends with “tion” (Nation, Action…).
*love*
Contains “love” anywhere, even inside a word (Glove, Lover…).

The whole-word and “starts-with” searches are instant. The ones that start with* (“ends with” / “contains”) have to read the whole library, so they can take a while — the site will tell you it’s still working.

Advanced search

Open Advanced search under the search box to combine any of these. They all stack together.

Title / Artist
Match the song title or the artist (wildcards work here too).
Genre
rock, jazz, hip-hop, and so on.
Year / Decade
A year range, or tap a decade chip (80s, 90s…).
BPM
Tempo range. (Algorithmically detected — treat as approximate.)
Title / Artist length
Number of characters — e.g. songs under 10 letters.
Label · Country · Language
Record label, artist country, ISO language code.
Release type
Album, Single, EP, Broadcast, Other.

Artists only

Tick Artists only to get a list of artist names instead of songs — handy for “which bands have a one-word name” type questions. Sort by popularity or alphabetically.

Where the data comes from

Song and artist data come from MusicBrainz; audio details (BPM, key, loudness) from AcousticBrainz; and popularity from Last.fm and ListenBrainz. Popularity, genre, and audio data are still filling in — the most-searched songs get enriched first, so the index improves every day.

Why is a search slow sometimes?

We don’t run the heavy search hardware the big sites do. Most searches are instant, but ones that have to scan the whole library — a wildcard that starts with *, or filters with no keyword — genuinely take time. They still return real results; adding a plain word from the title or artist makes them fast again.