iTunes Lyric Downloader
This program scans for lyrics at lyricwiki.com, and will save them to the iTunes lyric tag. That would allow you to see the lyrics on your iphone, ipod touch, ipod nano, etc. If you wanna give it a try, download and extract the zip file and run the program. Please leave program failures or successes in the comments. I've had fairly good results thus far. YMMV.
iTunes Lyric Downloader v.1.2
Version 1.2: now uses the lyricwiki SOAP courtesy of Karsten (thanks!). Saves a "notfound.txt" file listing lyrics that weren't found. This version no longer uses sing365.com - it's too difficult sorting through lyrics from that site.
The lyricwiki api is currently not working for me. I have created an interim solution here. The old program from this page is NOT currently working!
[Download] (downloaded 1888 times)
USAGE:
- In itunes, select the songs you'd like to find lyrics for. Click "Create Lyrics Files" when you're ready, and watch the search results (the app takes a few seconds to initialize first). The checkbox option will let you automatically overwite existing lyrics (only if you trust the program - TEST IT FIRST!). Otherwise the program will only fill in the lyrics if they are currently blank.
Notes:
- If you are having limited success, try running my itunes tagger program or MusicBrainz first to fix your mp3 tags (artists and song names will affect the search results).
If you use this program a lot, consider donating to LyricWiki.org.
October 19th, 2008 - 17:55
Where does the lyric get saved it says lyric saved but I cant see it in the lyric tab.
October 19th, 2008 - 22:30
It may be that the program was unable to find lyrics for the particular track you are checking. I’d check the program on a more popular track to see if the lyrics show up or not.
October 22nd, 2008 - 13:29
i tried again but failed again
i use windows xp
song =
linkin park
In The End
Hybrid Theory
i had a pop-up that said lyric saved but it isnt in it
October 24th, 2008 - 17:53
Ah, it looks like the two sites I use have changed their page setup.
I revised the program and updated the download link. Try running the new program and let me know if it works out.
October 25th, 2008 - 03:46
It worked now
thank you for updating your program,
i let you know when they change their sites again
October 26th, 2008 - 10:05
Sounds good – thanks, Winters.
January 11th, 2009 - 18:48
Thank you for making this program. It works like a charm. Are you still working on it? Any chance of a linux version?
Also, a change i thought that would improve the program. Maybe some statistics when the program is finished running displaying which songs lyrics were not found for. Just some ideas.
Thanks for your hard work.
January 29th, 2009 - 23:43
While adding lyrics, it’s erasing the cover information. Is this a bug?
January 30th, 2009 - 07:21
hsa2, is your cover information from the iTunes album art function or is it built into the id3 tag of the file? I haven’t heard of anyone else’s cover art being removed.
February 6th, 2009 - 17:39
Works fine!
I would like to see some feedback though about what queries the program uses and where the lyrics were downloaded from.
Some lyrics were not found for songs that are indeed in LyricWiki.org.
February 6th, 2009 - 18:20
The program uses a basic url to retrieve lyrics from lyricwiki. lyricwiki urls are composed of a basic structure of “http://lyricwiki.org/” + “Artist:title”. The lyrics that it doesn’t find are likely due to the html encoding procedure, where special characters are used in the artist or title. My program seems to use a different encoding algorithm for special characters. The lyrics may also be labeled something slightly different ie. “the” is missing from the artist name, etc.
There is an api for lyricwiki that might fix this error, but I don’t have the time to implement it at the moment.
February 24th, 2009 - 18:00
Hi SVanKruistum,
thank you for the nice program. I have used it for getting many lyrics for MP3s.
One comment though:
There is one bug connected to “special characters” as “umlauts” (i.e. “ä”, “ö”, “ü”) or apostrophes ” ‘ “. For example the lyrics from the song “Run” from the band “Extreme” are not imported correctly (http://lyricwiki.org/Extreme:Run, line 3: “Hey, so you got to go, you’re leaving what a pity”). This has something to do with the encoding of the lyrics. ISO8859 and UTF8 encoding are mixed up somehow.
As your program (and the source ! – thank you again) showed me how easy it is to retrieve data from lyricwiki I put together a small visual basic program to retrieve single lyrics. At the beginning I got the same result meaning wrong characters for Umlauts, … . But if you convert the lyrics (type string) to bytes assuming they are IS8859 encoded and convert the bytes back to string assuming they are UTF8 encoded it works fine: All characters are correct.
Thanks again for your program and hopefully this will help.
Karsten
February 24th, 2009 - 18:36
Great – thanks Karsten. I’ll have to give that a try. Do you have any idea what encoding to use for the title/artist?
February 24th, 2009 - 19:47
No, not really.
I did the programming (after being inspired by your program) with Visual Basic 2005 / .NET 2.0. I am using a “web reference”: The only thing I do is to give Visual Basic the URL of the SOAP service from LyricWiki and VB2005 is handling all the “rest”. Looking up a song I have to give a song title and an artist name (both strings) but I don’t really know how they are encoded. My guess would be either ISO8859 or UTF8 (As the lyric result from LyricWiki SOAP is send as an UTF8-encoded string but mistakenly interpreted as an UTF8-encoded string).
By the way: Looking up the lyrics of the German song “Männer sind Schweine” from the band “Die Ärzte” works fine from the start – in spite of the Umlauts.
February 24th, 2009 - 19:51
P.S.: I started a discussion on the SOAP discussion page of LyricWiki.org.
http://lyricwiki.org/LyricWiki_talk:SOAP#Another_Non-ASCII_characters_problem.3F_SOAP_and_Visual_Basic_2005_.2F_.NET_2.0
I have also included there the crucial part of the source code I am using for lyrics retrieval.
February 24th, 2009 - 21:48
Thanks – I’ll take a look.
March 9th, 2009 - 22:00
Thanks again, Karsten. I’ve used your code – now the app seems to run a lot smoother.
March 30th, 2009 - 22:52
This is freaking Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you!
April 13th, 2009 - 14:35
Hey there, thank you for making this program, it really IS great, found the lyrics for almost all of my songs. But there are 2 very little things that I think you could improve: when the program downloaded the lyrics, I couldn’t get it in the foreground, which can be annoying…
The other thing that I noticed was the lack of “design”. I think you could ask a friend or even make a design yourself, it really isn’t that hard, and will make your app way nicer to look at. Anyways THANK YOU for this app, great one. Frank
April 21st, 2009 - 13:34
Awesome utility! Makes life a lot simpler. Kudos!
May 27th, 2009 - 05:10
Dude, you are a legend!
June 16th, 2009 - 18:03
i have an artist ex. DMX (album artist)
but under the artists list i have eminem, lox, ect. feat on the album (artists)
so the songename are like, get me a dog (withoud feat eminem
for ex.
ARTIST ALBUM ARTIST TRACK NAME ALBUM
Eminem DMX Get me a dog Dogzz
now ive notice that he only finds lyrics by Artists, so that one (and all the good sorted othet tracks) he wolnd find
can you make the program tha it wil search on “album artist”…
((like the program)) but thats my only bug, im a real orginizer
August 16th, 2009 - 21:51
Wow, that was fun! Now every one of my songs contains text from the wiki site where this app pulls lyrics from telling me that they don’t provide lyrics anymore. It took forever to clean up the MESS!
August 17th, 2009 - 07:53
@”Me” Perhaps you should have read the text above, which states in capital letters “TEST IT FIRST”.
I apologize for the inconvenience everyone. The announcement was made Aug 02: http://groups.google.com/group/lyricwiki-api/browse_thread/thread/733ccd919d654040?pli=1
August 23rd, 2009 - 16:01
I’ve changed the program so it uses html. Hopefully it works for y’all
August 29th, 2009 - 09:18
Thank you! You’ve saved my life, I had thousands of songs with the small message about the API no longer working and I was worried I was going to have to remove each one by one.
Thank you so much!
September 4th, 2009 - 05:14
Hi,
LyricWiki seems to have moved under the Wikia banner… Will there be an update to the software as right now all lyrics show a ‘content not found’ error.
Thanks for this great piece of code!
September 6th, 2009 - 17:02
there seems to be a problem. yesterday and for the last few weeks ive loved this app and ive been using it constantly as its an amazing replacement for manually googling every lyric to all 6000 of my songs xD. but unfortunately, today, this app isnt finding any of my lyrics. it says ‘lyrics saved successfully” but cant find the lyrics to any of my songs.. even lyrics to songs ive used this app to find.. could this be a result of lyricswiki moving under wikia? if so, will there be an update?
September 7th, 2009 - 16:30
Hey all,
As Henry mentioned above, Lyricwiki has moved under the wikia banner. Not sure what this will mean for the api, but it is currently not working for me at all. Hopefully it will be repaired at some point soon.
September 7th, 2009 - 17:40
Try this for a temporary solution.
September 17th, 2009 - 04:28
Does this work with iTunes 9?
September 28th, 2009 - 18:24
could you possibly release one that works with itunes 9? ;D
thanks
September 28th, 2009 - 19:48
this works with itunes 9