Lyrics in ogg/vorbis and MP3 files(cweiske.de)
cweiske.de
Lyrics in ogg/vorbis and MP3 files
https://cweiske.de/tagebuch/embedded-lyrics.htm
63 comments
I wish more people would use these, whenever I buy music off of iTunes or Bandcamp it almost never 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 assume iTunes must just be using some other mechanism for conveying lyrics. Most new songs in the store do have lyrics; you can see them in the iOS and tvOS Music apps (not sure about desktop since I don't use the desktop app). I just spot checked a couple albums I bought from iTunes recently and every song I checked has lyrics. It even has them timed to the music like karaoke. If I go back a few years, I do see albums with no lyrics. Is this maybe something they've pushed recently?
None of the albums I recently bought on iTunes came with lyrics, although none of those albums qualifies as "new" (or even a recentish re-release, I guess), either.
Indeed, my assumption is they have somewhat recently added a lyric requirement for new albums added to the store. That's why I said new songs.
Unfortunately, locally stored music is a dead media.
shrug It still works for me. And presumably Epic thinks it’s worth something or they wouldn’t have bought Bandcamp just now.
I'm not fully convinced that Epic believes in locally stored music. Yes, Bandcamp is one of the last bastions of that, but Bandcamp is so laissez-faire I just can't see a megacorp like Epic tolerating DRM-free music sales (or even free hosting of free music, as I've used Bandcamp for) forever. Historically big business is antagonistic towards the DRM-free movement.
TBF, Epic hasn't really done anything to antagonize the DRM-free movement (and open-sourcing UE4 was a huge PR win for them), but neither have I seen them really go out of their way to support it the way, say, CD Projekt did with GOG, a store that at least at one time (and maybe still) exclusively sold DRM-free games.
I'm more inclined to read the Bandcamp acquisition as Epic's hipper eventual answer to iTunes, given their spat with Apple doesn't seem fully over. But I guess we'll see. I will admit I'm taking the news of the acquisition with more cynicism than is strictly warranted based on the observable facts.
TBF, Epic hasn't really done anything to antagonize the DRM-free movement (and open-sourcing UE4 was a huge PR win for them), but neither have I seen them really go out of their way to support it the way, say, CD Projekt did with GOG, a store that at least at one time (and maybe still) exclusively sold DRM-free games.
I'm more inclined to read the Bandcamp acquisition as Epic's hipper eventual answer to iTunes, given their spat with Apple doesn't seem fully over. But I guess we'll see. I will admit I'm taking the news of the acquisition with more cynicism than is strictly warranted based on the observable facts.
It really isn't.
There are very active communities of people who collect and distribute media.
check out https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
There are very active communities of people who collect and distribute media.
check out https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
I myself have a 135TB home server. I am well aware and invested in local data hoarding. It still doesn't remove the fact that it's getting harder to find certain media. Additionally, most people can't spin up a server... hell most people I know could barely sync their iPod to iTunes. Owning your own media is more expensive in both money and time. That's not a compromise that most people want to deal with.
theres quite a lot of things around these days that make it easier to get a similar experience to online services like spotify. (as long as music discovery isnt your main priority)
i use syncthing to sync my library between all my devices. resilio sync with its "selective sync" feature is another option if you have a huge library on one device but only want to sync certain things to a device like a phone that has less storage space.
i have a synology network drive that has a music server built in. its also fairly easy these days to get a VPS server up and running and install something like navidrome/funkwhale/airsonic. they all have docker containers as well which can make the whole process a bit quicker.
things like tailscale/zerotier let you access the music library on your server from anywhere with an internet connection.
beets/musicbrainz make it easier to manage metadata and album art.
i use syncthing to sync my library between all my devices. resilio sync with its "selective sync" feature is another option if you have a huge library on one device but only want to sync certain things to a device like a phone that has less storage space.
i have a synology network drive that has a music server built in. its also fairly easy these days to get a VPS server up and running and install something like navidrome/funkwhale/airsonic. they all have docker containers as well which can make the whole process a bit quicker.
things like tailscale/zerotier let you access the music library on your server from anywhere with an internet connection.
beets/musicbrainz make it easier to manage metadata and album art.
It's certainly still possible, but it's what it's always been, a niche solution for a small demographic.
What makes you think that? Dead as in record sales, CD sales?
Records are a different story because they're more of a collector's item. Interesting with CD sales going up, but I assume shortly we're going to start seeing the CD/DVD drive go away. I mean it's already out of most of our desktops, almost all of our laptops, and who honestly has a dedicated CD player these days?
Then you have artists like Kanye who are essentially versioning their music. It's happening more often and might render CD's as an incompatible or undesirable media.
Then you have artists like Kanye who are essentially versioning their music. It's happening more often and might render CD's as an incompatible or undesirable media.
Perhaps part of the problem is that these files tended to be distributed in a way that led to fragmentation: someone might add lyrics for their own local music files, but they might not share them back, or they might add them in a way that is unusual or unexpected to other users. Consensus becomes difficult to achieve.
Strangely enough, source control foundries seem to have solved a similar problem, to a large extent. They bring together a large number of very different (authorship, content, language, ...) projects within one communal space, and while they provide plenty of agency for project owners to adjust details as they wish, they also allow for forking/editing and tend to lead towards an "eventual consistency".
Perhaps a more-open, foundry-like model could work to gather consensus for lyrical annotation (potentially including natural language translations) of music.
Strangely enough, source control foundries seem to have solved a similar problem, to a large extent. They bring together a large number of very different (authorship, content, language, ...) projects within one communal space, and while they provide plenty of agency for project owners to adjust details as they wish, they also allow for forking/editing and tend to lead towards an "eventual consistency".
Perhaps a more-open, foundry-like model could work to gather consensus for lyrical annotation (potentially including natural language translations) of music.
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?
As others said, the only thing that changed is that most people stopped caring and moved on to streaming.
One thing that changed is that many users abandoned local audio files in favour of Spotify etc…
It's worse now, because there's more formats. Unfortunately, MP3 and AAC are still popular enough that software needs to support it, so you now need to support mp3/ogg/flac/aac plus opus, which is usually ogg container, but has its own additional metadata, and also sometimes it's in matroska container instead.
In short I'd say no
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.
It's probably because the use of lyrics file is too much of a niche compared to video subs.
It's probably because the use of lyrics file is too much of a niche compared to video subs.
Does the MKV container work without a video track? Is there any player that can handle "using" MKV for audio files?
Typically you'd name the extension ".mka" then. Any reasonably modern player using ffmpeg libraries for decoding should be able to deal with them fine.
Fun fact: There's also ".mks" for only including subs.
Fun fact: There's also ".mks" for only including subs.
https://www.matroska.org/technical/codec_specs.html - it seems that .mka would be perfect, it supports all codecs basically, and so you can losslessly move audio into the container and back out if needed.
You still need players that would understand how to display subtitles for a .mka container.
You still need players that would understand how to display subtitles for a .mka container.
I've had no issues using either mplayer on *nix, or foobar2k on windows for audio-only MKV.
Yea they can, MKV is just a container. If you open up MKV container via MKVToolNix, Handbrake or MediaInfo, you will see various formats in there. Though, not all audio/music players have a support for MKV and its variant.
Probably, I know I could create an MKV file with only Blu-Ray subtitle tracks (I archive the original when ripping my own stuff) and it was actually stored as a MKS. So I assume the same can be done with audio.
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.
It's a real shame the industry didn't treat lyrics in a song file as important as subtitles in a movie.
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.
In reality, not a big deal, just annoyed by it.
It's a real shame that I haven't even seen lyrics in music I purchase on Bandcamp.
It's a real shame the industry didn't treat lyrics in a song file as important as subtitles in a movie.
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.
In reality, not a big deal, just annoyed by it.
It's a real shame that I haven't even seen lyrics in music I purchase on Bandcamp.
Subtitles are actually a legal requirement for TV: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/closed-captioning-telev... and I assume DVDs, etc descend from that.
Such a legal requirement has never been implemented for audio files, but it would be nice to see something, though I'm not sure how easy it would be to argue it as a accessibility issue - it's easy to see how someone who is deaf/hard of hearing can watch a show with subtitles, but do they "listen" to music? Isn't music without sound just poetry?
Such a legal requirement has never been implemented for audio files, but it would be nice to see something, though I'm not sure how easy it would be to argue it as a accessibility issue - it's easy to see how someone who is deaf/hard of hearing can watch a show with subtitles, but do they "listen" to music? Isn't music without sound just poetry?
It's worth pointing out some songs intentionally don't have "authoritative lyrics", and some musicians leave the lyrics open to interpretation, or mix in phonetic gibberish intended to sound like words but with no clear meaning.
It's probably linked to why both there are no accessibility requirements for lyrics and they're not widespread in audio formats, that (some) musicians would see it as removing a dimension from their art.
(Although the same argument could be applied to movies, where a difficult to hear conversation could be "artistic expression", so I don't know where the line is drawn. FWIW, I'm the sort of person to watch movies with subtitles enabled even though my hearing is fine, and I prefer knowing the lyrics to music)
Edit: unrelated to lyrics, but I wonder if people with hearing impairment or complete lack of hearing listen to music for the sensation. With the right environment, you could physically experience at least some types of music, as vibrations on the skin. With frequency shifting this could probably be optimized...
It's probably linked to why both there are no accessibility requirements for lyrics and they're not widespread in audio formats, that (some) musicians would see it as removing a dimension from their art.
(Although the same argument could be applied to movies, where a difficult to hear conversation could be "artistic expression", so I don't know where the line is drawn. FWIW, I'm the sort of person to watch movies with subtitles enabled even though my hearing is fine, and I prefer knowing the lyrics to music)
Edit: unrelated to lyrics, but I wonder if people with hearing impairment or complete lack of hearing listen to music for the sensation. With the right environment, you could physically experience at least some types of music, as vibrations on the skin. With frequency shifting this could probably be optimized...
Supposedly Beethoven's music is noticeably different as he began to go deaf later in life (I've heard stories that he had a piano with the legs removed so he could feel the vibrations through the floor).
There is a "definitive" question that often cannot be answered; similar to over-analyzing anything - just trying to "say" what the word is may not be desirable or possible.
And subtitling itself is an art I feel, you can really tell the cheap vs well done ones. And it's interesting to see how things are clarified (and lost) sometimes; we do the same where we always have the subtitles on.
I've always felt there's room for jokes that nobody will see unless they have subtitles on, for example, imagine a standard high-school comedy, the nerdy kid is going to school and the happy music is playing and the subtitle says [UPBEAT MUSIC] - but suddenly the music turns darker and the subtitle changes to [BEATUP MUSIC].
There is a "definitive" question that often cannot be answered; similar to over-analyzing anything - just trying to "say" what the word is may not be desirable or possible.
And subtitling itself is an art I feel, you can really tell the cheap vs well done ones. And it's interesting to see how things are clarified (and lost) sometimes; we do the same where we always have the subtitles on.
I've always felt there's room for jokes that nobody will see unless they have subtitles on, for example, imagine a standard high-school comedy, the nerdy kid is going to school and the happy music is playing and the subtitle says [UPBEAT MUSIC] - but suddenly the music turns darker and the subtitle changes to [BEATUP MUSIC].
> I wonder if people with hearing impairment or complete lack of hearing listen to music for the sensation
I went to a university that has a relatively high deaf and hard of hearing population (probably near 5%), and one thing that was common was that those students would like bass heavy music, since you can kind of feel the song/beat. We'd have concerts on campus and have an interpreter on stage signing the lyrics of the song, and deaf students would often gather closer to the sub woofers.
I went to a university that has a relatively high deaf and hard of hearing population (probably near 5%), and one thing that was common was that those students would like bass heavy music, since you can kind of feel the song/beat. We'd have concerts on campus and have an interpreter on stage signing the lyrics of the song, and deaf students would often gather closer to the sub woofers.
You do sometimes seem subtitles that say stuff like "[unintelligible conversation]" or "[faintly] I know", which I suppose helps preserve the artistic elements.
That makes sense, since a friend of mine would always have to make subtitles for her student films. I believe there was also a lawsuit over some MIT lecture recordings that were available publicly but didn't have subtitles a little while back. I wonder how that turned out.
I've noticed when uploading to Youtube it will ask some questions about subtitling - and one of the options is "never on broadcast TV in the USA".
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).
No source that I'm aware of provides a public API, leaving tools like beets to haphazardly scrape a handful of websites[1].
[1]: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/plugins/lyrics.html
No source that I'm aware of provides a public API, leaving tools like beets to haphazardly scrape a handful of websites[1].
[1]: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/plugins/lyrics.html
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).
This is as close as it comes, they've been around for years, and used to be the source for the hundreds of lyrics sites that used to exist.
https://www.musixmatch.com
I can't remember if it was them or another service (edit: I'm pretty sure it was actually https://www.lyricfind.com ) that used to have a free licensing tier if your lyrics site included their ads, which were for a scam ring tone subscription service that would trick users into a ringtone "subscription" billed to their mobile carrier. The ads promised MIDI ringtones on every lyric page, but usually they didn't have them for more obscure songs.
https://euobserver.com/news/29005
https://www.musixmatch.com
I can't remember if it was them or another service (edit: I'm pretty sure it was actually https://www.lyricfind.com ) that used to have a free licensing tier if your lyrics site included their ads, which were for a scam ring tone subscription service that would trick users into a ringtone "subscription" billed to their mobile carrier. The ads promised MIDI ringtones on every lyric page, but usually they didn't have them for more obscure songs.
https://euobserver.com/news/29005
> It's really unfortunate that there isn't a single, high-quality reference source (with an API) for song lyrics…
Does Genius not serve this purpose? https://docs.genius.com/#songs-h2
Does Genius not serve this purpose? https://docs.genius.com/#songs-h2
My understanding, which might be dated, is that the Genius API intentionally does not serve lyrics in a machine-readable format to avoid IP problems.
That's why LyricsGenius uses an HTML scraper to extract the lyrics[1], and why other tools (like beets) have data quality issues.
[1]: https://lyricsgenius.readthedocs.io/en/master/how_it_works.h...
That's why LyricsGenius uses an HTML scraper to extract the lyrics[1], and why other tools (like beets) have data quality issues.
[1]: https://lyricsgenius.readthedocs.io/en/master/how_it_works.h...
No source that I'm aware of provides a public API
> "ogg/vorbis is a patent-free audio codec and thus my preferred choice over mp3."
mp3 is patent-free as well, as far as i know.
mp3 is patent-free as well, as far as i know.
According to archive.org, this page was written in 2016 or earlier (their earliest entry is for dec. 2016).
The mp3 patents expired in 2017, so at the time it was not patent-free.
AAC-LC is also patent-free now. Same support as MP3 across devices while providing much better quality.
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.
"Half-broken" can be discussed, but Apple Music has fantastic lyrics support ^1, with timed lyrics for a large part of the library. Even with nice visual indicators on intro's and bridges etc. where you can visually see how close you are to lyrics starting again by three dots slowly filling up.
^1 Example: https://www.maketecheasier.com/assets/uploads/2020/03/Apple-...
^1 Example: https://www.maketecheasier.com/assets/uploads/2020/03/Apple-...
If someone is looking for Android, check out Musicolet. Absolutely free, doesn't even request the WiFi permissions so one can be assured it does not track. Also is lightweight, and (relatively) customisable.
Been using Musicolet. I agree that it's great.
https://krosbits.in/musicolet/
https://krosbits.in/musicolet/
I haven't heard of any spyware or advertising Winamp. It doesn't have very good lyrics support (maybe not any?) out of the box, but there are tons of plugins.
I cannot absolutely vouch for it on the spyware front (though I didn't encounter anything suspicious so far), but https://www.mediahuman.com/lyrics-finder/ does work (i.e. isn't half-broken) and doesn't contain advertising, either.
Musicolet is a fantastic app for Android.
Completely offline, almost every feature you need, supports tag editing and displays lyrics from the metadata too.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.krosbits.mu...
Completely offline, almost every feature you need, supports tag editing and displays lyrics from the metadata too.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.krosbits.mu...
foobar2000 works great for my local mp3 collection on two different windows machines.
It's even possible to use it as a source for internet radio stream using some other software (butt & voicemeter) and lot of black magic.
It's even possible to use it as a source for internet radio stream using some other software (butt & voicemeter) and lot of black magic.
Its been a long while since I used EvilLyrics: http://www.evillabs.sk/evillyrics/
If you have files which have lyrics already embedded I believe BlackPlayer does a pretty good job (and it's a very awesome and well customisable music player in and of itself).
I use Foobar2000 with OpenLyrics and it's been great.
There’s always mpg123
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 :-)
The lib supports:
https://github.com/Zeugma440/atldotnet
The lib supports:
- default tags (id3 v2.3, v2.4, APEtag 1.0-2.0, m4a, ogg)
- chapters
- lyrics
- custom tags
https://github.com/Zeugma440/atldotnet
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.
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.
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.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's one thing to store the lyrics in the file, but the entire UX around the use of those lyrics is pratically non-existent.
Storing the text is the easy part. Procuring files with lyrics baked in or adding lyrics to your pre-existing library is another. And so far, almost no music player supports them, their UI isn't necessarily optimized for displaying lyrics, and there is no widespread standard for their format.
Storing the text is the easy part. Procuring files with lyrics baked in or adding lyrics to your pre-existing library is another. And so far, almost no music player supports them, their UI isn't necessarily optimized for displaying lyrics, and there is no widespread standard for their format.
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.
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.
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.
I ended with writing timestamps with comments using Notepad.
I ended with writing timestamps with comments using Notepad.
Examples of support say mostly Ubuntu 2014. Surely something is different now? Wondering too abt. MPV.