Making a homebrew release for a live show

Note: I wrote this post two months before publishing it because I wrote the draft and then...forgot to post it so I'm just posting it now to get it out of the way, it's probably fine but I just want to set expectations lol

Let's say, hypothetically, that one of your favorite artists/DJs recently played a set. Let's say the set has been recorded and is floating around on the internet.

So obviously, you want a copy to listen to on your music player of choice. Right? But you're annoying particular, like me, and prefer when DJ sets are cut into individual tracks.

How would you go about it? I've done that a couple of times now for multiple sets and shows, so here's how I do it.

0. Getting The Video

If the set is on YouTube, use yt-dlp, or cobalt.tools¹, or JDownloader. If it's on something that's not YouTube, chances are yt-dlp and JDownloader will be able to grab it.

1. Cutting into Parts

Grab the excellent LosslessCut app. Import the video file into it. This guide assumes that you, somehow, have a tracklist with timestamps to go off of.
If you're doing this on a show from a relatively well-known artist, chances are someone has already figured out the tracklist. 1001tracklists.com is an excellent source for those.

If we take the example of this specific dj set, the exported tracklist text looks like this

Étienne de Crécy & Cassius & DJ Falcon - Trabendo Paris 2025-09-26

[00:00] ID - ID
w/ Daft Punk - Technologic [DAFT LIFE/WARNER FRANCE]
[01:47] Carte Blanche - Politrix As Usual [ED BANGER]
[03:02] Sav-E - Yallec [MINIMAL KIDS]
[05:20] Basement Jaxx - Jump N Shout (ID Remix) [XL]
[08:09] Fedde Le Grand - Liquid Music [TOOLROOM]
... and so on

We want it to look like this instead

Étienne de Crécy & Cassius & DJ Falcon - Trabendo Paris 2025-09-26

00:00 ID - ID
01:47 Carte Blanche - Politrix As Usual
03:02 Sav-E - Yallec
05:20 Basement Jaxx - Jump N Shout (ID Remix)
08:09 Fedde Le Grand - Liquid Music
... and so on

Go to File > Import project > Text chapters / YouTube². Paste the text snippet you generated. LosslessCut will split the video into chunks. It will look like this.

2. Exporting the Files

The details of this step will vary based on your specific video file — here I'm working with an mp4 file with AAC audio tracks. So when clicking "Export", I tell LosslessCut to only export the audio track, and I tell it to export .m4a files.

2(Bis). Converting the Files

You will probably want to convert those files to a more "common" audio format. .m4a works fine, but you probably want to convert those to FLAC or MP3 or whatever. I'll leave this part to your discretion, I personally use ffmpeg for that by navigating to the folder with the files and running something like this

for file in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i $file "$file.flac"; done;

3. Tagging

For this part, I use Meta³ because it has a very convenient CSV import feature. Meaning I will go into Google Sheets, make two columns "title" and "artist" and export it as a CSV that looks like this

artist, title
ID, ID
Carte Blanche, Politrix As Usual
Sav-E, Yallec
Basement Jaxx, Jump N Shout (ID Remix)
Fedde Le Grand, Liquid Music

And Meta will be able to fill the title and artist fields automatically.

You can use whatever tagging tool you want on this one.

Here are some rules of thumb I follow when tagging, you're obviously free to do whatever you want:

• I use the "album artist" for the main performing artist (in our example above that would be "Étienne de Crécy & Cassius & DJ Falcon")
• When multiple tracks are mixed together, I will put "Artist 1 & Artist 2" and "Title 1 / Title 2" for the artist and title field respectively.
• Apple Music loves to add (Mixed) as a suffix in the title field (https://music.apple.com/us/album/nye-2025-dj-mix/1779812248). I'm not convinced this is really useful, but you can do it.

I also like to have the files be renamed following the $tracknumber - $title.extension format, but again, that's all up to you. Although in the case of a DJ mix with lots of artists/tracks together, you don't want to have a filename that's too long.

4. (Extra Credits) Artwork.

That's entirely optional but is, in my opinion, where you can have some fun messing around in Photoshop. I like to find promotional pictures of the show and try to follow the style guide of the show/event/artist related to the DJ mix.

And that's it!