Lyrics on the iPhone and late-night coding sessions

The iPhone is pretty bad ass.  It will display lyrics from mp3 files if they’re stored in the MP3.  Come to find out if you have lyrics downloaded for your songs, they will show up on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or any iPod running the latest firmware.  This works great for the damn deaf like myself – I swear sometimes my ears have aged to 80 years old while the rest of me stays late 20′s.  Now instead of humming certain pieces from the songs I can actually view the lyrics for the songs that I sing offkey, embarrassing all family and friends within earshot.  At least I’ll know the words to the damn song!

iTunes handles the lyric thing well but there was no way I was going to hand-input lyrics for my abridged 9000+ tracks.  That’s when a Google search showed me an iTunes COM API that’s exposed for people to work with, and even found some example scripts.  3 total hours and 5 bowls later I completed the iTunes Lyrics Finder.  It’s a simple program that reads all files in your iTunes library that don’t have lyrics associated with them, and attempts to find lyrics for that song using LyricWiki.  It won’t mess with files that contain lyrics already.  There are no fancy options; just a simple, elegant interface and a link to Computer Products for Education, which I ask that you visit and consider making a purchase from in the future if my program worked out well for you.

iTunes Lyrics Finder Application

iTunes Lyrics Finder requires Windows, the .NET Framework 2.0 runtime and iTunes.  It’s recommended you start iTunes and don’t open any other iTunes dialogs (like Get Info) while the software finds lyrics for you.  If you start the program with the optional parameter -killinvalid, it will also remove invalid files from your library.  (If you’re not familiar with the command line, right click the program and create a shortcut.  Right click the shortcut, go to Properties, and add a space and “-killinvalid” without quotes to the end of the contents of the “target” box and click OK.  Run this shortcut to kill invalid entries in your library.)

derreckdean.com-iTunesLyricsFinder.zip (194kb)

So after I built this program I found some other programs out there that will do the same thing.  There’s a LOT of these programs out there, some you have to pay for and some free.  Here’s the source code; the program really wasn’t that hard to make, and can possibly hang up or crash or eat all the Oreos you [thought] you hid really well.  I tested this with only my iTunes.  If it does crash, email me a copy of the log file in the application folder and I’ll update it relatively quickly.  Disclaimer: I’m not responsible for fucked files, fried hard drives, lost virginities and the like.  I know the UI isn’t super reponsive, maybe someone with more experience writing multithreaded apps could help.

derreckdean.com-Source-iTunesLyricsFinder.zip (1,500kb)

All it does is loop through your library for audio files that don’t have lyrics, and tries to download lyrics for these files using LyricsWiki.  I worked on the meat of it from 1:30am to 3:30am Monday night and the next day made some minor edits to make it work a little smoother.  I apparently suck at writing multithreaded application still but what I have in place seems to work alright.  If you make changes to the program, send the source back to me to add into the program.

It’s time for me to kick back and relax.  Later.