Easily find lyrics for all your songs

[home] | [user guide] | [download] | [what's new] | [report a bug] | [forum]

Running LyricsFetcher for the first time

When you first run LyricsFetcher, it will read songs from your iTunes library (if iTunes is not installed, it will read your Windows Media Player library). This initial reading may take quite a few seconds. Don't worry - all other loadings will be much quicker.

Once the songs are loaded, you select the songs for which you want to find lyrics and then click Fetch . LyricsFetcher will then look on the web for lyrics for the selected songs. If it finds some, it will write them into your music library, otherwise it will mark the song has having failed to find lyrics.

Since this is the first time you have used LyricsFetcher, you should click Select Untried and then click Fetch .

This will try to find lyrics for all the songs in your library that don't have any lyrics. This is actually what you will do most time you use LyricsFetcher: click Select Untried and then click Fetch .

The process of finding lyrics for a song generally takes about one second per song. This is quite fast, but on your first run, you may have quite a few songs that need lyrics. A library of about 2000 songs will take about 30 minutes to try to find lyrics for all of them.

When the fetching process is finished, you have finished too. All lyrics found will have been written into your music library, and can now be used from there. If you have an iPod, hook it up, sync it, and all your songs will have lyrics.

Running LyricsFetcher later on

After a couple of weeks, you may have added new songs to your library. You may also want to see if the lyrics databases on the web now have lyrics for some of your songs for which they previously didn't.

This time when you run LyricsFetcher, it should load significantly faster. This time, you should use the Select Missing button.

The button Select Missing does not select missing songs, which would be metaphysically difficult, but rather selects songs for which the lyrics are either empty or which have the "lyrics fetch failed" marker. Once some songs are selected, you click the "Fetch" button again to start looking for lyrics.

Song Details

When a track is selected, its information is displayed in the Details section at the bottom of the window. Any changes you make to this information will be written back into your music library. If several tracks are selected, the details section will show values that are common to all the selected songs. If you make a change to any of the details, all the selected tracks will be updated. Be careful with this because there is no Undo function.

When a single track is selected, the Play and Search buttons will be enabled. Play plays the song, while Search opens a browser window and does a Google search for lyrics for the selected song. This is useful if LyricsFetchers built-in mechanism fails.

Some songs are more equal than others

LyricsFetcher knows that not all songs are equal, and there are some tracks for which it shouldn't try to fetch the lyrics. Most obviously, some file formats cannot store lyrics (like .wav files). Other formats can store lyrics but neither iTunes nor Windows Media Player know how to do that (like .ogg files).

Songs that do not have a title or an artist will be ignored. Similarly, songs that have a title that looks like "Track 99" will be ignored since such title are almost always generated and inaccurate.

LyricsFetcher also uses the genre of the song to decide whether or not to try to find lyrics for it. Some genres that are automatically ignored are: "Books & Spoken", "Classical", "Instrumental", and "Podcast." There is currently no user interface to change these settings, though it can be done by editing the "IgnoredGenres" section of LyricsFetcher.exe.config file.

These "ignore" settings govern how the "Select Missing" and "Select Untried" buttons work. You can completely ignore the ignore settings! Just select the song you want, and click Fetch. LyricsFetcher will obediently try to find that song's lyrics, even if the song has no name, no artist, and its genre is "Classical."

Hints for finding lyrics

The crucial issue when finding lyrics for songs is accurate song details.

LyricsFetcher uses the songs title and artist to locate lyrics. If this information is missing or wrong, LyricsFetcher will not be able to find lyrics for your songs. Even the best fetching algorithm cannot find lyrics for a song called "Track 1" by "Unknown Artist." Similarly, trying to find lyrics for songs by the artist "Eninem" will not work - you would have more luck with the artist "Eminem."

Spaces, ampersands, and little words like "the" and "and" can also prove troublesome in names. Was the song "Stickwitu" performed by "The Pussycat Dolls" or by "Pussycat Dolls" or by "Pussy Cat Dolls" (or even "PCD")? Was "The Power of Love" sung by "Hewy Lewis & the News" or by "Hewy Lewis and the News"?

There is usually no right answer - if it doesn't work as it is, try another variation. Or use the "Search" button, since Google has already figured out how to solve such trivialities.

Menu Commands

Choose Library

This command lets you switch between iTunes and Windows Media Player as your music library.

Reload Library

This command tells LyricsFetcher to re-read the list of track from your music library. You would use this command If you had added tracks to (or removed tracks from) your music library since LyricsFetcher was launched,

Discard Cache

The first time you run LyricsFetcher, it examines every song in your library to see if it has lyrics. This is quite a slow process, so LyricsFetcher caches these results so that it doesn't have to do that process again next time it runs.

However, if you make changes to the lyrics of your songs outside of LyricsFetcher, LyricsFetcher will not know about those changes. It will continue to use the information stored in its cache.

So, if you add or remove lyrics within iTunes (or Windows Media Player), you should use this command to tell LyricsFetcher to throw away all its cached information. The next time LyricsFetcher runs, it will examine every song again to see if it has lyrics.