I wish more people would <i>use</i> these, whenever I buy music off of iTunes or Bandcamp it almost <i>never</i> comes with the lyrics embedded. I know Bandcamp supports it because I recall being delightfully surprised by some music an acquaintance sold there having lyrics; not sure I can recall ever getting them off of iTunes. Every now and then iTunes sells me an album that comes with a PDF of the CD booklet, that’s about the closest it comes.
I wrote an mp3/ogg/flac/acc metadata parser over 10 years ago, and it was an absolute shower of shit with regards to character sets and compatibility between players and encoders. Has anything changed?
Sadly the ability to show lyrics on musical files isn't as "standardized" as on video files. The MKV container is great for that, with the ability to add subtitle files as additional data streams, and most players are able to handle it. I wish the FLAC format would actually decide on an actual tagging standard for synced and unsynced lyrics data.<p>It's probably because the use of lyrics file is too much of a niche compared to video subs.
I was thinking about this a bit over a year ago while automating ID3 tagging on my library and started thinking about how there's no standardized lyrics in music. I was using ID3v1, which I think explains my issue, but I guess it still wouldn't have helped since I've never seen the option in a player or anything.<p>It's a real shame the industry didn't treat lyrics in a song file as important as subtitles in a movie.<p>Mini rant: back when I was in high school (I'm a college graduate now, for context on how long it's been), Spotify had a lyric feature that was good enough. It was out of sync a lot, but pretty alright. One day, the button to display lyrics started saying that they were working on the feature and it would be back soon. Then, in the near future, they just removed the button. They added it back for a good chunk of popular songs a few months ago probably. It works pretty alright, but it's a shame I have to use a proprietary service, and it wasn't a priority for the biggest music streaming service to have the lyrics to a song.<p>In reality, not a big deal, just annoyed by it.<p>It's a real shame that I haven't even seen lyrics in music I purchase on Bandcamp.
It's really unfortunate that there isn't a single, high-quality reference source (with an API) for song lyrics, the way there is for artist/album metadata (MusicBrainz) or cover art (Cover Art Archive).<p>No source that I'm aware of provides a public API, leaving tools like beets to haphazardly scrape a handful of websites[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/plugins/lyrics.html" rel="nofollow">https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/plugins/lyrics.html</a>
I've yet to find a music/lyrics app that isn't half-broken or riddled with spyware and advertising. Edit: I thought saying "app" made it clear I needed it for a mobile device, Android, sorry. Foobar2000 is my choice of music player, it just doesn't do lyrics on mobile. I do think it's a testament to how underserved this niche is that all the replies are either desktop programs or mobile apps that don't support displaying lyrics while playing a song.
If someone is looking for a possibility to do this with C#, I can recommend atl.net [1] library. Currently I am working on a tagging command line tool called `tone` that utilizes the library to do awesome stuff :-)<p>The lib supports:<p><pre><code> - default tags (id3 v2.3, v2.4, APEtag 1.0-2.0, m4a, ogg)
- chapters
- lyrics
- custom tags
</code></pre>
for the most modern audio formats.<p><a href="https://github.com/Zeugma440/atldotnet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Zeugma440/atldotnet</a>
Seems like a simple problem to solve as long as there’s support for arbitrary metadata in the file format. Just store the LRC data in as plaintext in one of those fields and call it a day.
Of course without a proper written standard it’s going to be a hodgepodge of everyone inventing their own standard way of doing something catered to their use case. It’s an inevitable part of the software world.<p>If you absolutely need to pack the data into the audio file you can probably make a simple extractor program to read the audio file and extract the lyric data into a format that the player can read natively then feed it in to the player. Or patch the player software to support your format. The former is usually the easier option, of course.
Embedding lyrics in files is great, but still half-baked. You’re often opening up the lyrics to see what the words are in that particular moment in the song.<p>Apple Music took this feature one step further and actually provides a way to sync lyrics to the music. The UI is very intuitive as well. Not sure if Spotify offers this too.
I recently wanted to add bookmarks/keywords to a recording of a lecture, but was amazed I couldn't find any software that does that. And yes, I've seen the VLC bookmark plugin.<p>I ended with writing timestamps with comments using Notepad.