No song I have purchased since 2019 has lyrics attached, since nazi and racist trolls got Lyrics Wiki shut down. This made my jwzlyrics program pretty useless.Anyway, I have questions:
- Is there some API that will let me ask Apple for lyrics? Assume that I am logged in to iCloud and the store and such. (Apple is apparently using musixmatch on the backend.)
- Ok, how about Google? Sometimes search results have lyrics in them. Is there any way to get that without scraping HTML?
- What does macOS "Music / Preferences / Advanced / Automatically Update Artwork" actually do? I am afraid to check that box. Does it touch lyrics as well? Does it update ID3 data in the files on disk, or just in some database off to the side? Will it screw up the artwork and lyrics that I already have? Note that I have never purchased a song from Apple.
- Is "Music / File / Library / Get Album Artwork" the same thing? I assume that operates on the whole library and not just on the currently playing track?
- There are a thousand programs on GitHub that will download lyrics from various services, if you have created an account and API key on those services (which is some bullshit). But are any of them any good? By "good" I mean, I can have a nightly cron job that adds missing lyrics for recent downloads, and can expect it to do the right thing.
It's amazing to me the the music conglomerates have basically conceded that all music is available everywhere for a dollar a month and nobody's ever going to get paid, but they are still treating the lyrics like those are the most precious thing they own.
