I’ve had a couple of people ask me how I’m having lyrics displayed on my iPhone/iPod. This is something that’s eluded me for a while now, so I thought I’d write it up.
First off, you probably need to use iTunes for your music. Since iTunes is the easiest way to get music onto an iPod to being with you probably already have it. Inside of iTunes in the Info panel for each song (CTRL+I to view) you can change the title, album, track info. There is also a tab for Lyrics. Whatever is pasted into this Lyrics tab will display on your iPod. This page has a basic step-by-step guide for iPods: iTunes: Adding song lyrics to iPod (apple.com)
So where do you find the lyrics? Generally a google search will turn them up. But doing that for every song gets tedious. This is where lyric software comes in. When you play a song in iTunes the software searches for the lyrics and automatically adds them to the lyrics information tab.
Since I use a Mac for my iTunes library I used the software called iClip Lyrics from 1th Dream. (How does one pronounce 1th by the way?) Someone on Twitter posted about it and it worked really well. Here’s the link: http://www.1thdream.com/
What I did with mine was verified that it was working and then just let the songs play with the sound off on my mac. There’s probably an apple script that would run through them all faster, but I wasn’t really in a hurry and it only took a day.
For PC users, I’m sure the same type of software exists, but I don’t have experience with any of it… if you have one to share, leave a comment.
Another thing to note is that some artists or recording labels consider posting of lyrics a copyright infringement. This is why Apple provided the ability to add and display lyrics, but not the actual lyrics themselves.
For the PC, you can use iLyrics (http://code.google.com/p/ilyrics/) that will sync up with lyricwiki.org to pull up lyrics for songs and install them into the lyrics tab of the song info. The only drawback is it requires you to select the songs you want it to import and doesn’t do it automatically. Still, heckuva lot better than doing it manually.
Neil’s last blog post: NeilMcD: @jarednevans Is he sitting in coach? Wow.
Very cool. I’ll keep this in mind to do it later down the road!
Thank you for this! I’m hearing and I like to see lyrics for new songs. I also found a script that skips through the songs automatically, which was nice, because I have 11.4 days worth of music in my iTunes library. I didn’t want to leave it running for 11 days! Here’s a script that does can skip through tracks:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=needledrop
You can decide how long to stay on each track. I went with 2 seconds, and that worked.
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