I have looked long and hard for a way to get lyrics into my music files. I have about 8 programs that attempt to insert lyrics into songs, mostly while the songs are playing. I have even looked at a couple of iPhone/iPod touch apps that display lyrics. Unfortunately, they don’t store the discovered lyrics into the music because AppStore applications are not allowed to store data outside their little sandbox. I felt like I was never going to find a “fast and easy” way to add lyrics to my music, until I found the Mac program “Get Lyrical“.

The Unoffical Apple Weblog had a post about getting lyrics using a program and AppleScript combo that doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but its very slow. They suggest using an AppleScript program that plays the first 10 seconds of a song along with GimmeSomeTunes to find and insert lyrics. With my collection of music, it would take just under 2 DAYS to get all the lyrics it could. My method only took about 30 minutes.

Get Lyrical is a free (donation-ware) application that one thing and does it very well. It gets lyrics for songs in iTunes and adds them to the songs ID3 tags.

The UI is very clean and simple. A button to add lyrics to a selection of tracks in iTunes, a button to add lyrics the currently playing track, and a button to add lyrics to songs as they play. There are two “quick look” buttons that open up a HUD type window to show you the lyrics found for a particular track.

The best feature of Get Lyrical is the Tag Selection button. I selected all 16,000+ tracks in iTunes and clicked the button. It told me how many tracks it had found, and started processing. About 30 minutes later, it showed me how many tracks it had found lyrics for. That was it, over 10,000 tracks in iTunes with lyrics added with very little effort at all.

You can use the “Active Tagging” feature to work like other programs out there. However, I found it very frustrating to have the song you are playing pause for a second or two so that the lyrics can be inserted into the ID3 tags. Other programs also seem to “lockup” iTunes while it’s searching for the lyrics as well as inserting the found lyrics into the tags. I really hated this. If I was using iTunes to look at something in the AppStore, I found I had to wait for the other lyrics program to finish its search before I could do what I wanted to do. I just don’t find this method the best way to get lyrics.

This program doesn’t get album art or do anything other than get lyrics for iTunes music. However, it does this exceptionally well. If you want lyrics in your music so that you can see them when playing the songs on your iPhone/iPod touch or iPod, this is the program to get the job done and get it done quickly.

Update (8/8/2009): It looks like the RIAA is putting the hammer down on sites like LyricWiki that give Get Lyrics the ability to download lyrics easily. Check out the new post I wrote about this news.

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