Update: The one method I was using before simply ran through the music folders in the iPod, and then read the Artist and Song Name from each file and then wrote the fetched lyrics to the tag. This didn’t seem to work because it apparently required that I still view the lyrics from within iTunes for it to take effect. So I decided to rewrite it, it now uses iTunes to do the work, so it will only work on Windows with iTunes running, but it works flawlessly now.
I recently discovered for the first time that you could view lyrics while you’re listening to songs on your iPod. The only problem is that you have to get the lyrics yourself. Now, that’s fine if you just want to get lyrics for a couple of songs, but when you want to get lyrics for all or most of your songs (I have 1550, and I’m sure most people have way more), that becomes a problem. That’s what I made iLirix for.
Download iLirix
I haven’t programmed in a long while, I think it’s been since April when I finished TIP 0.6., and I didn’t really feel like programming either. But I found out you could do that, and I got that idea, so I figured I’d just do this. I didn’t make a GUI for it because I’ve learned that it’s a waste of my time to make things idiot proof, when even then dumb idiots don’t understand things, only for a few people to use. So it’s a console application, but it works just fine. I wrote it in C# and must actually credit a few people for their indirect help:
» The creator of Banshee Lyrics Plug-In. Banshee is an open source media player (Which interfaces seamlessly with iPod) for Linux written in C#. So when I got the idea, I knew I could get some help from this plug-in.
» The creators of Wiki-Lyrics. This open source program for Linux gets lyrics from currently playing songs in many players from many sites, among other things. The only problem was that it was written in Ruby, so I had to translate a couple things, namely the URL construction methods and the specific site lyric parser methods. If it weren’t for them I’d be stuck using Banshee Lyrics Plug-In’s lyrc.com.ar site, which isn’t necessarily the best lyric site out there (Though it does work).
It’s a pretty straightforward program that should run on any platform that has .Net 2.0 support (Windows and any other OS with Mono). You can get .Net 2.0 here.
To run it, double click on it on Windows. It’ll ask for the name of the iPod, it’s case sensitive (Lower and Upper case matters), you can find out the name of your iPod by going to Extras > About on the iPod or hooking it up to your PC and looking within iTunes. Note that once you type it in and press Enter it will start doing its job, and although you can stop it by closing the window, I suggest against it because it would leave things half way done.
It wont find lyrics for a few songs, and that’s normal. When it doesn’t find lyrics, it doesn’t write them at all so it would be as if you hadn’t run the program. There’s no risk of anything I believe, the worst that can happen would be getting the wrong lyrics but I’m sure that’s highly unlikely. I’ll write a program soon that blanks out the lyrics on all the songs in case anyone wants to revert (Don’t know why you would want to). It might take a while, so like I mentioned, I suggest you don’t stop it or do it whenever you’re not using your computer (Not necessary, though). IMPORTANT: I suggest you minimize iTunes and NOT TOUCH IT, if you use it there’s a good chance you’ll get an error. If that’s the case, don’t worry, just re-run the program.
Once you press Enter, it’ll tell you how many songs you have (Estimate I guess) and then it will immediately begin doing its job. Once it’s complete, it will tell you how many songs lyrics weren’t found for, and there will be a file in the same folder called nolyrics.txt which will contain a list of the songs for which lyrics weren’t found, in case you would ever feel like searching for them on your own.
There shouldn’t be any problems, but if you do just let me know.
Currently under development
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