iTunes Lyric Downloader

I’ve decided to re-learn visual basic, and started by writing a quick program that scans for lyrics at lyricwiki.com, and will save them either to a text file or to the iTunes tag file. 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 this zip file and run the program. Please leave program failures or successes in the comments, since the program is still in Beta.

iTunes Lyric Downloader v.1.0(Beta)

[Download]

New in this version:

1. Added option to search for lyrics at sing365.com
2. Should fix the runtime error some people were reporting.
3. Added an option to erase all the lyrics in the playlist. Use this if the results didn’t work for you, or if you want to start fresh.
4. Updated the GUI so it’s a little more intuitive (and prettier ;))

USAGE:

• The “find itunes playlists” button allows you to scan for playlists in iTunes. Use the drop-down box to select a playlist where you want it to search for songs (try the program first with a short playlist, then if its successful, you can just leave “Music” selected to search for your whole collection.)
• There are four check boxes:
  • One enables saving the lyrics to text files in the specified directory (the default is “C:\”. You’ll wanna click “browse” if you use this option!)
  • The second will save the lyrics it finds to the song data in itunes. This will allow you to see the lyrics on your ipod (once you have synced it).
  • One (or both) of the above check-boxes need to be selected for it to do anything.
  • The third will allow you to search sing365.com for lyrics if lyricwiki.org shows no results. Though my success rate has been high with sing365 thus far, the site is a bit of an advertising mess, and some of their lyrics might not work perfect. That said, this option will fill about 75% more lyrics spaces than just searching lyricwiki.
  • The last check box will erase all the lyrics on the selected playlist. This allows you to start fresh if you have any old lyrics in itunes and want the program to replace those as well.
• Click “Create Lyrics Files” when you’re ready, and watch the progress bar go.

Notes:

1. It will not*replace lyrics (ie. if there’s something in the “lyrics” tag, then it skips that song or if there’s a text file already, it skips that file)
2. If you are having limited success, try running MusicBrainz first to fix your mp3 tags (artists and song names will affect the search results).
3. I’ll probably work on a version of this to download tabs from ultimateguitar, and expand this one to search more sites.

If you use this program a lot, consider donating to LyricWiki.org.