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 ipod video or ipod nano. 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, since the program is still in Beta. I’ve had fairly good results thus far. YMMV.
iTunes Lyric Downloader v.1.2(Beta)
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.
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 at 5:55 pm
Winters Stijn said:
Where does the lyric get saved it says lyric saved but I cant see it in the lyric tab.
October 19th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
admin said:
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 at 1:29 pm
Winters Stijn said:
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 at 5:53 pm
admin said:
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 at 3:46 am
Winters Stijn said:
It worked now
thank you for updating your program,
i let you know when they change their sites again
October 26th, 2008 at 10:05 am
admin said:
Sounds good - thanks, Winters.
January 11th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
gilbert42989 said:
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 at 11:43 pm
hsa2 said:
While adding lyrics, it’s erasing the cover information. Is this a bug?
January 30th, 2009 at 7:21 am
admin said:
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 at 5:39 pm
D said:
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 at 6:20 pm
admin said:
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 at 6:00 pm
Karsten said:
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 at 6:36 pm
admin said:
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 at 7:47 pm
Karsten said:
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 at 7:51 pm
Karsten said:
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 at 9:48 pm
admin said:
Thanks - I’ll take a look.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
admin said:
Thanks again, Karsten. I’ve used your code - now the app seems to run a lot smoother.
March 30th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Connie S said:
This is freaking Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you!
April 13th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Frank G said:
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 at 1:34 pm
kenpem said:
Awesome utility! Makes life a lot simpler. Kudos!
May 27th, 2009 at 5:10 am
Tofi said:
Dude, you are a legend!
June 16th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
ronny said:
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