Update, 2013: I wrote my own lyrics importer.
lyrics
Since the PearLyrics guy gave up, every now and then I look for a new iTunes plugin that downloads and displays lyrics. There are surprisingly few. But I recently came across GimmeSomeTune, which, despite the terrible name, seems reasonable. But I think it gets lyrics only from lyricwiki.org, which means it doesn't have a very big set to choose from. Still, the UI is mostly reasonable, and it has a menubar iTunes controller built in too (I had been using ByteController for that.)
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, mac, music, www
Current Music: Bounte -- Going Nowhere ♬
15 Responses:
I'm still holding out until Amarok becomes stable on OSX, whenever that happens. I didn't realize how much I used in-application lyric and Wiki search until I couldn't do them anymore. Not to mention how much better it is at finding album art since Amazon has way more music than the iTunes store.
Until that time, iTunes is fine for "hit the button and make music come out", but I try to avoid trying to make it do anything Apple didn't plan for.
I've started to use Discogs for verification (and correction) of meta-data and for album artwork. Generally the meta-data is more accurate than the more open Wikipedia, and the artwork is very high resolution when you can find it (which is most of the time).
Amazon's artwork seems capped at 200x200 or below (or at least appears that wa most of the time) -- that's fine for tiny thumbnails, but is noticable in iTunes full-screen mode and on higher resolution iTunes devices (iPhone, iPod touch).
Are you using it to manually update art and ID3 tags, or is there some plugin somewhere that I'm not seeing?
I like iTunes fine for ripping and tagging, it's fast and Gracenote is accurate, but in terms of having a fluid collection, like just taking a bunch of albums and dropping them in the collection and having it update, I use Amarok. Album art is also all Amarok, since iTunes doesn't seem to have a "fetch all missing art" option, and too often the artist isn't on ITMS. I then just take the SQLite DB from Amarok and dump it on my webserver so I can see my collection in a record store on my phone. I've heard that the iPhone uses SQLite to store iTunes DB info, and I'm hoping that comes soon to the Mac version if it's true.
But to JWZ's point, I don't understand why there aren't loads of choices for lyrics search in iTunes. It just seems like a problem that more people would want to solve.
Command-a to select all tracks. Right click "Get Album Artwork".
Of course it's that simple, I'm a tool. I think I never bothered to try more than right-click in coverflow and "get artwork", since half my albums aren't in iTMS anyway.
I tried some of the applications that use lyricwiki, and it just disgusted me. Inconsistent formatting between songs, typoes, wrong lyrics, grammatical mistakes, inconsistent formatting within a song. It's clear that every thirteen year old ever is on the site, and from what I understand, administration/moderation is kind of short right now.
Lyricwiki is already much better than it was a year ago. It doesn't have the Google-fu that Wikipedia does, but it's usually got whatever I'm looking for already. And at least if there are mistakes they can be corrected, unlike whatever Geocities site one usually has to crib lyrics from.
- Chris
I see all that same crap on the other random lyrics sites, and they also have tons of ads and popups, so it's not much different to me. At least on a wiki I could edit obvious mistakes if I cared to.
If anything else, it's incentive for us to go fix it. I know that once I install this plugin I will probably be adding and fixing a great deal.
As others have said, if you know of any lyrics site for which that is not true, I'd like to hear about it.
http://www.sciencenewsden.com/2008/mitdevelopsadvancedhumanlikerobot.shtml
I was using "Sing This iTune" for the Dashboard, but I'm not sure if there's a version for Leopard yet since it's not showing on new Lappy even with data transfer.
Nevermind, seems it still works, but the migration assistant enabled some of my dashboard settings and not others. weird.
I've been real happy with Harmonic from mindquirk.com. It sits in my Dashboard and watches what plays -- if there's a lyrics match it stuffs them in; if there isn't it doesn't.
I religiously MusicBrainz my stuff as it comes in, which does better than iTunes on landing album art. The picardQT tagger can be frustrating (and oh lord the edit police on MB sometimes drive me nuts), but having full, accurate metadata that updates idempotently is worth it.
I find Dashboard utterly without merit. I can't fathom why anyone uses it for anything ever.