Lyrics!

[DaveiPhone]

I found this on one of the Touch forums and tried it out. This downloads and stores the lyrics to the music you are listening to in iTunes on your phone or Touch automatically. It keeps them in a database on the phone, so if you launch it while a song is playing that is stored, it automatically switches to those lyrics, otherwise it will try to find them. Coolness.

http://code.google.com/p/lyrics-app/

It's in Japanese, but it didn't take much effort to translate, as the Keys were all in English.

Just go into the Japanese.lproj folder and open up the Localizable.strings file, replace the Japanese strings with the same text as the key name (which are in English). Or you can just replace the file with the one I attached (unzip it first).

Now it will still flash Japanese on startup, because the Default.png is that way. Replace it with the image I've attached and you're good to go.

To use this efficiently, start up your music before launching the program. Double-click the Home button to bring up the iPod controller. After it finds the lyrics (or fails), just click the forward button to go to the next song. I was able to go through my songs very quickly this way.

[pleyah69bjay]

kewl let me try..

[Jodiedicie]

Did it crash or freeze when you installed it? I used your zip and I can't get it to work. Any ideas?

[DaveiPhone]

No, it worked perfectly for me. You did unzip it first, yes? And just replaced that one file? And checked to make sure your privileges were set properly for the app?

[Jodiedicie]

Yep, my zips automatically unzip when I download them. Could you give me the name of a song that worked for you and I will try it?

[s2kpdx]

Just tried this app, it has only found a few of my songs, but pretty cool idea

[DaveiPhone]

Could you give me the name of a song that worked for you and I will try it?

It worked for most Beatles songs, and many other popular artists like, The Band, Tom Waits, Steely Dan, John Mayer, Barenaked Ladies, etc.

But of course it won't find everything.

[freenrich]

Works great!
But is there no way to add your own lyrics to the app manually?
Or even to change the source where it gets the lyrics from?

[Dash-2]

I put my songs on shuffle and these have worked so far:
Billy Joel - We Didn't Start the Fire
Eagles - I Don't Want to Hear Anymore
Jack Johnson - With My Own Two Hands
OK Go - Let It Rain
Queen - Don't Stop Me Now
South Park - Up There
SOAD - She's like Heroin
SOAD - Innervision

So as you can see, it's mainly "older" songs, but I get about 50% of the lyrics for the songs i listened too.

Oh, and I've included the app with the modified English files so all you need to do is download, copy to your iPhone/iTouch, chmod, and go!

[DaveiPhone]

Thanks Dash, I wasn't sure if it was OK to upload a modified app here, but in the future I'll just do it that way.

Works great!
But is there no way to add your own lyrics to the app manually?
Or even to change the source where it gets the lyrics from?

As for adding lyrics manually, it's really very easy if you're comfortable editing plists. In private/var/root//Media/Lyrics you'll find all the lists. I copied an existing artist.plist, renamed it, then changed the items in the list to a new artist, and copied the new list back to the phone. Then I copied the "LYLibraryCache.plist" and added a new key there with the artist name and path. Just for neatness, I dragged it up in the list so it would be properly alphabetized, then copied the list back to the phone. Worked like a champ and sounds much harder than it is.

There's also another app on the Google source that looks like it's made to convert TunesTEXT files for you, but I haven't had a chance to mess with it yet and I don't speak Japanese. I did a google translate on the read me, and it's quite strange, and unhelpful.

[Jodiedicie]

Well, I'm not quite sure why this isn't working for me. I uninstalled what I had put on my phone, installed the one that Dash uploaded here, opened my iPod, played We Didn't Start the Fire, then opened Lyrics, and it just keeps closing.

Is it supposed to be doing anything while it is searching, spinning logo, anything like that? Mine just sits there for about a minute then closes.

[DaveiPhone]

Well, I'm not quite sure why this isn't working for me. Mine just sits there for about a minute then closes.

That's the classic symptom when your permissions are set incorrectly. Check that.

[Dash-2]

Thanks for the lyrics file names DaveiPhone.
Jodiedicie, I use MobileFinder if you prefer that.

[Jodiedicie]

That was it. I missed one permission earlier when I installed it. Thanks so much for sticking with me and helping me work this out! Now that I can actually comment on it, great app!

[Bleh5]

doesn't itunes allow you to store lyrics within the mp3 file already? wouldn't it be easier to have a program that will look within the mp3 first?

[DaveiPhone]

OK, now I've figured out how to use the TunesTEXT2Lyrics lyric import utility, and it works quite well! (Sorry PC folks, AFAIK it's for Mac users only)

There's a little Dashboard Widget called TunesText, that you can get here:

http://www.cyanworks.net/downloads/TunesTEXT0.7.4.zip

This is basically a Mac version of the Lyric utility, but it's a bit more advanced. It has multiple search engines, you can control iTunes from it, it finds many more lyrics, and when it fails to find them automatically, you can type or paste lyrics into it.

It saves the lyrics into individual song plist files, sorted into Artist folders, at this location:

~/Library/Application Support/TunesTEXT

To test it, I sorted my playlist in iTunes by Artist, then started playing at the first song of an artist, then opened the Widget. As it acquired the lyrics, I chose next song until I had all the lyrics for that Artist. Not only did it create the lyrics files, it also simultaneously added them into the song for viewing in iTunes on your computer.

To convert those files to iPhone Lyrics compatible files, I launched TunesTEXT2Lyrics, and dropped the Artist folder from ~/Library/Application Support/TunesTEXT/ onto the window. Poof! It created a folder on my Desktop called Lyrics with a single plist (named for the Artist) containing all those songs. I added that to my Lyrics Folder on the phone, then added the artist name and path to the LYLibraryCache.plist. As if by magic, all those songs worked perfectly within Lyrics on the phone.

I retested this dragging multiple artist folders as well, and this worked perfectly too. In addition, the program creates a file called LYBlackList.plist which contains a list of any songs that were in the Artist.plist that were missing the lyrics.

Hope that's clear.

[EmoRebellion]

Is there a way to change the lyric server it checks? Maybe we can find a more complete one. I know there are utilities for winamp that automatically grab the lyrics from online.

How large of a music library do you have Dave? How large is the Lyrics folder?

[DaveiPhone]

Is there a way to change the lyric server it checks? Maybe we can find a more complete one. (snip)
How large of a music library do you have Dave? How large is the Lyrics folder?

Unfortunately, the developer hard-coded the server check and it looks pretty complex to try to change that (just changing the URL won't work).

I've got over 25000 songs in iTunes on my computer, but only 1100 or so on my phone. I still haven't filled in all the lyrics, but I'm guessing that the completed lyrics will take about 2MB on my phone.

[iphoneguy2007]

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble getting this to work. I've checked my permissions -- they're set to 755. Is this correct? I've also manually created a new folder in the /var/root/Media directory. what else should i do? thanks!

[verbalist]

u cann add lyrics tru itunes