Lyrics in ogg/vorbis and MP3 files

https://cweiske.de/tagebuch/embedded-lyrics.htm

by severine • 4 years ago

93 63 4 years ago

I wrote an mp3/ogg/flac/acc metadata parser over 10 years ago, and it was an absolute shower of shit with regards to character sets and compatibility between players and encoders. Has anything changed?

cpach• 4 years ago

One thing that changed is that many users abandoned local audio files in favour of Spotify etc…

toyg• 4 years ago

As others said, the only thing that changed is that most people stopped caring and moved on to streaming.

declnz3• 4 years ago

In short I'd say no

Hello71• 4 years ago

It's worse now, because there's more formats. Unfortunately, MP3 and AAC are still popular enough that software needs to support it, so you now need to support mp3/ogg/flac/aac plus opus, which is usually ogg container, but has its own additional metadata, and also sometimes it's in matroska container instead.

causi• 4 years ago

I've yet to find a music/lyrics app that isn't half-broken or riddled with spyware and advertising. Edit: I thought saying "app" made it clear I needed it for a mobile device, Android, sorry. Foobar2000 is my choice of music player, it just doesn't do lyrics on mobile. I do think it's a testament to how underserved this niche is that all the replies are either desktop programs or mobile apps that don't support displaying lyrics while playing a song.

ZYinMD• 4 years ago

I use Foobar2000 with OpenLyrics and it's been great.

severak_cz• 4 years ago

foobar2000 works great for my local mp3 collection on two different windows machines.

It's even possible to use it as a source for internet radio stream using some other software (butt & voicemeter) and lot of black magic.

iggldiggl2• 4 years ago

I cannot absolutely vouch for it on the spyware front (though I didn't encounter anything suspicious so far), but https://www.mediahuman.com/lyrics-finder/ does work (i.e. isn't half-broken) and doesn't contain advertising, either.

mynameismon• 4 years ago

If someone is looking for Android, check out Musicolet. Absolutely free, doesn't even request the WiFi permissions so one can be assured it does not track. Also is lightweight, and (relatively) customisable.

acidburnNSA• 4 years ago

Been using Musicolet. I agree that it's great.

https://krosbits.in/musicolet/

thesuitonym• 4 years ago

I haven't heard of any spyware or advertising Winamp. It doesn't have very good lyrics support (maybe not any?) out of the box, but there are tons of plugins.

geenew• 4 years ago

There’s always mpg123

zuno• 4 years ago

Its been a long while since I used EvilLyrics: http://www.evillabs.sk/evillyrics/

leokennis• 4 years ago

"Half-broken" can be discussed, but Apple Music has fantastic lyrics support ^1, with timed lyrics for a large part of the library. Even with nice visual indicators on intro's and bridges etc. where you can visually see how close you are to lyrics starting again by three dots slowly filling up.

^1 Example: https://www.maketecheasier.com/assets/uploads/2020/03/Apple-...

hashhar• 4 years ago

If you have files which have lyrics already embedded I believe BlackPlayer does a pretty good job (and it's a very awesome and well customisable music player in and of itself).

ffpip• 4 years ago

Musicolet is a fantastic app for Android.

Completely offline, almost every feature you need, supports tag editing and displays lyrics from the metadata too.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.krosbits.mu...

extheat• 4 years ago

Seems like a simple problem to solve as long as there’s support for arbitrary metadata in the file format. Just store the LRC data in as plaintext in one of those fields and call it a day. Of course without a proper written standard it’s going to be a hodgepodge of everyone inventing their own standard way of doing something catered to their use case. It’s an inevitable part of the software world.

If you absolutely need to pack the data into the audio file you can probably make a simple extractor program to read the audio file and extract the lyric data into a format that the player can read natively then feed it in to the player. Or patch the player software to support your format. The former is usually the easier option, of course.

mileza• 4 years ago

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's one thing to store the lyrics in the file, but the entire UX around the use of those lyrics is pratically non-existent.

Storing the text is the easy part. Procuring files with lyrics baked in or adding lyrics to your pre-existing library is another. And so far, almost no music player supports them, their UI isn't necessarily optimized for displaying lyrics, and there is no widespread standard for their format.

woodruffw2• 4 years ago

It's really unfortunate that there isn't a single, high-quality reference source (with an API) for song lyrics, the way there is for artist/album metadata (MusicBrainz) or cover art (Cover Art Archive).

No source that I'm aware of provides a public API, leaving tools like beets to haphazardly scrape a handful of websites[1].

[1] https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/plugins/lyrics.html

declnz3• 4 years ago

    It's really unfortunate that there isn't a single, high-quality reference source (with an API) for song lyrics, the way there is for artist/album metadata (MusicBrainz) or cover art (Cover Art Archive).

My gut tells me this is because labels (or even streaming giants) realised it's monetisable and thus will pursue any API that gets big enough :(

CharlesW• 4 years ago

It's really unfortunate that there isn't a single, high-quality reference source (with an API) for song lyrics…

Does Genius not serve this purpose? https://docs.genius.com/#songs-h2

woodruffw2• 4 years ago

My understanding, which might be dated, is that the Genius API intentionally does not serve lyrics in a machine-readable format to avoid IP problems.

That's why LyricsGenius uses an HTML scraper to extract the lyrics[1], and why other tools (like beets) have data quality issues.

[1] https://lyricsgenius.readthedocs.io/en/master/how_it_works.h...

krrrh• 4 years ago

This is as close as it comes, they've been around for years, and used to be the source for the hundreds of lyrics sites that used to exist.

https://www.musixmatch.com

I can't remember if it was them or another service (edit: I'm pretty sure it was actually https://www.lyricfind.com ) that used to have a free licensing tier if your lyrics site included their ads, which were for a scam ring tone subscription service that would trick users into a ringtone "subscription" billed to their mobile carrier. The ads promised MIDI ringtones on every lyric page, but usually they didn't have them for more obscure songs.

https://euobserver.com/news/29005

declnz3• 4 years ago

    No source that I'm aware of provides a public API

Well that said there are a few; I quite like https://lyrics.ovh/

egypturnash2• 4 years ago

I wish more people would use these, whenever I buy music off of iTunes or Bandcamp it almost never comes with the lyrics embedded. I know Bandcamp supports it because I recall being delightfully surprised by some music an acquaintance sold there having lyrics; not sure I can recall ever getting them off of iTunes. Every now and then iTunes sells me an album that comes with a PDF of the CD booklet, that’s about the closest it comes.

pathartl4• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, locally stored music is a dead media.

Teever• 4 years ago

It really isn't.

There are very active communities of people who collect and distribute media.

check out https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

egypturnash2• 4 years ago

shrug It still works for me. And presumably Epic thinks it’s worth something or they wouldn’t have bought Bandcamp just now.

jhoechtl• 4 years ago

What makes you think that? Dead as in record sales, CD sales?

mackrevinack• 4 years ago

theres quite a lot of things around these days that make it easier to get a similar experience to online services like spotify. (as long as music discovery isnt your main priority)

i use syncthing to sync my library between all my devices. resilio sync with its "selective sync" feature is another option if you have a huge library on one device but only want to sync certain things to a device like a phone that has less storage space.

i have a synology network drive that has a music server built in. its also fairly easy these days to get a VPS server up and running and install something like navidrome/funkwhale/airsonic. they all have docker containers as well which can make the whole process a bit quicker.

things like tailscale/zerotier let you access the music library on your server from anywhere with an internet connection.

beets/musicbrainz make it easier to manage metadata and album art.

electroly2• 4 years ago

I assume iTunes must just be using some other mechanism for conveying lyrics. Most new songs in the store do have lyrics; you can see them in the iOS and tvOS Music apps (not sure about desktop since I don't use the desktop app). I just spot checked a couple albums I bought from iTunes recently and every song I checked has lyrics. It even has them timed to the music like karaoke. If I go back a few years, I do see albums with no lyrics. Is this maybe something they've pushed recently?

iggldiggl2• 4 years ago

None of the albums I recently bought on iTunes came with lyrics, although none of those albums qualifies as "new" (or even a recentish re-release, I guess), either.

jka• 4 years ago

Perhaps part of the problem is that these files tended to be distributed in a way that led to fragmentation: someone might add lyrics for their own local music files, but they might not share them back, or they might add them in a way that is unusual or unexpected to other users. Consensus becomes difficult to achieve.

Strangely enough, source control foundries seem to have solved a similar problem, to a large extent. They bring together a large number of very different (authorship, content, language, ...) projects within one communal space, and while they provide plenty of agency for project owners to adjust details as they wish, they also allow for forking/editing and tend to lead towards an "eventual consistency".

Perhaps a more-open, foundry-like model could work to gather consensus for lyrical annotation (potentially including natural language translations) of music.

m-p-32• 4 years ago

Sadly the ability to show lyrics on musical files isn't as "standardized" as on video files. The MKV container is great for that, with the ability to add subtitle files as additional data streams, and most players are able to handle it. I wish the FLAC format would actually decide on an actual tagging standard for synced and unsynced lyrics data.

It's probably because the use of lyrics file is too much of a niche compared to video subs.

bombcar5• 4 years ago

Does the MKV container work without a video track? Is there any player that can handle "using" MKV for audio files?

hatsuseno• 4 years ago

I've had no issues using either mplayer on *nix, or foobar2k on windows for audio-only MKV.

alternatetwo• 4 years ago

Typically you'd name the extension ".mka" then. Any reasonably modern player using ffmpeg libraries for decoding should be able to deal with them fine.

Fun fact: There's also ".mks" for only including subs.

Isthatablackgsd• 4 years ago

Yea they can, MKV is just a container. If you open up MKV container via MKVToolNix, Handbrake or MediaInfo, you will see various formats in there. Though, not all audio/music players have a support for MKV and its variant.

m-p-32• 4 years ago

Probably, I know I could create an MKV file with only Blu-Ray subtitle tracks (I archive the original when ripping my own stuff) and it was actually stored as a MKS. So I assume the same can be done with audio.

jjice3• 4 years ago

I was thinking about this a bit over a year ago while automating ID3 tagging on my library and started thinking about how there's no standardized lyrics in music. I was using ID3v1, which I think explains my issue, but I guess it still wouldn't have helped since I've never seen the option in a player or anything.

It's a real shame the industry didn't treat lyrics in a song file as important as subtitles in a movie.

Mini rant: back when I was in high school (I'm a college graduate now, for context on how long it's been), Spotify had a lyric feature that was good enough. It was out of sync a lot, but pretty alright. One day, the button to display lyrics started saying that they were working on the feature and it would be back soon. Then, in the near future, they just removed the button. They added it back for a good chunk of popular songs a few months ago probably. It works pretty alright, but it's a shame I have to use a proprietary service, and it wasn't a priority for the biggest music streaming service to have the lyrics to a song.

In reality, not a big deal, just annoyed by it.

It's a real shame that I haven't even seen lyrics in music I purchase on Bandcamp.

bombcar5• 4 years ago

Subtitles are actually a legal requirement for TV: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/closed-captioning-telev... and I assume DVDs, etc descend from that.

Such a legal requirement has never been implemented for audio files, but it would be nice to see something, though I'm not sure how easy it would be to argue it as a accessibility issue - it's easy to see how someone who is deaf/hard of hearing can watch a show with subtitles, but do they "listen" to music? Isn't music without sound just poetry?

spijdar• 4 years ago

It's worth pointing out some songs intentionally don't have "authoritative lyrics", and some musicians leave the lyrics open to interpretation, or mix in phonetic gibberish intended to sound like words but with no clear meaning.

It's probably linked to why both there are no accessibility requirements for lyrics and they're not widespread in audio formats, that (some) musicians would see it as removing a dimension from their art.

(Although the same argument could be applied to movies, where a difficult to hear conversation could be "artistic expression", so I don't know where the line is drawn. FWIW, I'm the sort of person to watch movies with subtitles enabled even though my hearing is fine, and I prefer knowing the lyrics to music)

Edit: unrelated to lyrics, but I wonder if people with hearing impairment or complete lack of hearing listen to music for the sensation. With the right environment, you could physically experience at least some types of music, as vibrations on the skin. With frequency shifting this could probably be optimized...

jjice3• 4 years ago

That makes sense, since a friend of mine would always have to make subtitles for her student films. I believe there was also a lawsuit over some MIT lecture recordings that were available publicly but didn't have subtitles a little while back. I wonder how that turned out.

xattt• 4 years ago

Embedding lyrics in files is great, but still half-baked. You’re often opening up the lyrics to see what the words are in that particular moment in the song.

Apple Music took this feature one step further and actually provides a way to sync lyrics to the music. The UI is very intuitive as well. Not sure if Spotify offers this too.

pestatije2• 4 years ago

"ogg/vorbis is a patent-free audio codec and thus my preferred choice over mp3."

mp3 is patent-free as well, as far as i know.

yyyk2• 4 years ago

According to archive.org, this page was written in 2016 or earlier (their earliest entry is for dec. 2016). The mp3 patents expired in 2017, so at the time it was not patent-free.

pestatije2• 4 years ago

On the right-hand menu:

"July 26, 2016 updated April 8, 2021"

Seems to be about this specific article.

ksec• 4 years ago

AAC-LC is also patent-free now. Same support as MP3 across devices while providing much better quality.

ncmncm• 4 years ago

Examples of support say mostly Ubuntu 2014. Surely something is different now? Wondering too abt. MPV.

sandreas• 4 years ago

If someone is looking for a possibility to do this with C#, I can recommend atl.net [1] library. Currently I am working on a tagging command line tool called `tone` that utilizes the library to do awesome stuff :-)

The lib supports:

  - default tags (id3 v2.3, v2.4, APEtag 1.0-2.0, m4a, ogg)
  - chapters
  - lyrics
  - custom tags

for the most modern audio formats.

https://github.com/Zeugma440/atldotnet

shimonabi• 4 years ago

I recently wanted to add bookmarks/keywords to a recording of a lecture, but was amazed I couldn't find any software that does that. And yes, I've seen the VLC bookmark plugin.

I ended with writing timestamps with comments using Notepad.

Lyrics in ogg/vorbis and MP3 files

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