Read Synchronized Lyrics embedded in metadata section of audio file ; MP3 → ID3 → SYLT tag ; MP4 / M4A → XMP

[porg]

Foreword

• I asked for documentation in
  • Please make the user manual available #624
• Hence I can only speculate on what LyricsX supports and implements.

Current capabilities — From observation

• I opened an MP3 which has an ID3 metadata section which contains "Synchronized Lyrics" as a SYLT tag

  • which I had created myself, and added to the MP3 file with Kid3
    • Language: "ger" (German)
    • Time unit: "Milliseconds" (as opposed to MPEG frame numbers)
    • Character encoding: UTF-8

• ❌ LyricsX does not show lyrics for this song when playing it back.

• 💡 I need to open: LyricsX menu item → Show Lyrics Window → Drag and drop a .LRC file on it (which I also had).

  • This then seems to get added to ~/Music/LyricsX/Song Name - Artist Name.lrcx
  • Henceforth whenever I play the song the lyrics get shown.

Feature request

• LyricsX can read in the Synchronized lyrics embedded in the audio file
  • Ideally does this at runtime, so it parses the audio file each time its playback starts
  • If this is to slow (too much disk access and CPU utilization), have a simple caching mechanism:
    • Get timestamp of the audio file.
    • Look for corresponding .LRCX sidecar file ~/Music/LyricsX/
      • If there ain't one, then parse the audio file
      • If there is a corresponding LRC file, check whether it is up to date
        • If the .LRCX file is younger or the same age than the audio file, then use the LRCX file.
        • If the audio file is younger, then parse the audio file for embedded synchronized lyrics.

Relevant Metadata

• MP3 uses ID3 which has the tag SYLT.
• MP4 container (such as M4A using AAC audio codec) uses XMP and the tag \xa9lyr