Monday, January 14th, 2008

Alternatives to iTunes Lyric Downloader

So, it turns out theres a couple programs out there that already perform the same task that mine has been written to do:

• The iTunes lyrics importer is a simple application written in C# to import lyrics for the songs in your iTunes, using the Lyricswiki’s web services.
  • Doesn’t seem to support any other sites, which I may plan on doing.
• iGrabber is a Windows application that automatically downloads album art and lyrics for selected iTunes tracks.
  • Same site restriction as above
• EvilLyrics has a client that supports itunes lyrics, but you need to have the program running as you listen to music. This does support various sites and I once found a script that automatically imports all your evillyrics files into iTunes. However, it is a bit of a nuisance always making sure that the program is up and running while you listen to music.

These programs all work and look better than mine at this point. As such, I’ve given up. Just kidding. I like to program, and i’ll see where this ends up. Hopefully I can fix some issues on other computers, and support some other lyrics sites, or a guitar tab site.

Other ideas:

• A script that pops up on a song change and lets you rate the track you just heard, and displays currently playing info after changing songs.

Leave any iTunes addon suggestions in the comments below.

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

iTunes Lyric Downloader (alpha release?)

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. See This page. Please leave a comment here if you have any success/failure stories.