Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) based metabolomics has become an important approach in life science research due to its powerful separation and high sensitivity detection. However, because of the lack of an effective mass spectra library for metabolite identification, a vast amount of detected metabolites are unable to be identified. The improvement of the metabolite coverage and the discovery of biomarkers are harmed, leading to the severe loss of chemical and biological information. The metabolite identification has become a major bottleneck in metabolomics studies. This review describes recent advances of metabolite identification based on atmospheric pressure ionization (API)-MS data. In particular, it focuses on the advances in mass spectrometer instruments, assignment of elemental compositions, database and spectral search, computer-aided spectral interpretation, etc.