Lyrics in ogg/vorbis and MP3 files
cweiske.de
cweiske.de
There are very active communities of people who collect and distribute media.
check out https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
TBF, Epic hasn't really done anything to antagonize the DRM-free movement (and open-sourcing UE4 was a huge PR win for them), but neither have I seen them really go out of their way to support it the way, say, CD Projekt did with GOG, a store that at least at one time (and maybe still) exclusively sold DRM-free games.
I'm more inclined to read the Bandcamp acquisition as Epic's hipper eventual answer to iTunes, given their spat with Apple doesn't seem fully over. But I guess we'll see. I will admit I'm taking the news of the acquisition with more cynicism than is strictly warranted based on the observable facts.
Then you have artists like Kanye who are essentially versioning their music. It's happening more often and might render CD's as an incompatible or undesirable media.
i use syncthing to sync my library between all my devices. resilio sync with its "selective sync" feature is another option if you have a huge library on one device but only want to sync certain things to a device like a phone that has less storage space.
i have a synology network drive that has a music server built in. its also fairly easy these days to get a VPS server up and running and install something like navidrome/funkwhale/airsonic. they all have docker containers as well which can make the whole process a bit quicker.
things like tailscale/zerotier let you access the music library on your server from anywhere with an internet connection.
beets/musicbrainz make it easier to manage metadata and album art.
Strangely enough, source control foundries seem to have solved a similar problem, to a large extent. They bring together a large number of very different (authorship, content, language, ...) projects within one communal space, and while they provide plenty of agency for project owners to adjust details as they wish, they also allow for forking/editing and tend to lead towards an "eventual consistency".
Perhaps a more-open, foundry-like model could work to gather consensus for lyrical annotation (potentially including natural language translations) of music.
It's probably because the use of lyrics file is too much of a niche compared to video subs.
Fun fact: There's also ".mks" for only including subs.
You still need players that would understand how to display subtitles for a .mka container.
It's a real shame the industry didn't treat lyrics in a song file as important as subtitles in a movie.
Mini rant: back when I was in high school (I'm a college graduate now, for context on how long it's been), Spotify had a lyric feature that was good enough. It was out of sync a lot, but pretty alright. One day, the button to display lyrics started saying that they were working on the feature and it would be back soon. Then, in the near future, they just removed the button. They added it back for a good chunk of popular songs a few months ago probably. It works pretty alright, but it's a shame I have to use a proprietary service, and it wasn't a priority for the biggest music streaming service to have the lyrics to a song.
In reality, not a big deal, just annoyed by it.
It's a real shame that I haven't even seen lyrics in music I purchase on Bandcamp.
Such a legal requirement has never been implemented for audio files, but it would be nice to see something, though I'm not sure how easy it would be to argue it as a accessibility issue - it's easy to see how someone who is deaf/hard of hearing can watch a show with subtitles, but do they "listen" to music? Isn't music without sound just poetry?
It's probably linked to why both there are no accessibility requirements for lyrics and they're not widespread in audio formats, that (some) musicians would see it as removing a dimension from their art.
(Although the same argument could be applied to movies, where a difficult to hear conversation could be "artistic expression", so I don't know where the line is drawn. FWIW, I'm the sort of person to watch movies with subtitles enabled even though my hearing is fine, and I prefer knowing the lyrics to music)
Edit: unrelated to lyrics, but I wonder if people with hearing impairment or complete lack of hearing listen to music for the sensation. With the right environment, you could physically experience at least some types of music, as vibrations on the skin. With frequency shifting this could probably be optimized...
There is a "definitive" question that often cannot be answered; similar to over-analyzing anything - just trying to "say" what the word is may not be desirable or possible.
And subtitling itself is an art I feel, you can really tell the cheap vs well done ones. And it's interesting to see how things are clarified (and lost) sometimes; we do the same where we always have the subtitles on.
I've always felt there's room for jokes that nobody will see unless they have subtitles on, for example, imagine a standard high-school comedy, the nerdy kid is going to school and the happy music is playing and the subtitle says [UPBEAT MUSIC] - but suddenly the music turns darker and the subtitle changes to [BEATUP MUSIC].
I went to a university that has a relatively high deaf and hard of hearing population (probably near 5%), and one thing that was common was that those students would like bass heavy music, since you can kind of feel the song/beat. We'd have concerts on campus and have an interpreter on stage signing the lyrics of the song, and deaf students would often gather closer to the sub woofers.
No source that I'm aware of provides a public API, leaving tools like beets to haphazardly scrape a handful of websites[1].
[1]: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/plugins/lyrics.html
It's really unfortunate that there isn't a single, high-quality reference source (with an API) for song lyrics, the way there is for artist/album metadata (MusicBrainz) or cover art (Cover Art Archive).
Does Genius not serve this purpose? https://docs.genius.com/#songs-h2
That's why LyricsGenius uses an HTML scraper to extract the lyrics[1], and why other tools (like beets) have data quality issues.
[1]: https://lyricsgenius.readthedocs.io/en/master/how_it_works.h...
I can't remember if it was them or another service (edit: I'm pretty sure it was actually https://www.lyricfind.com ) that used to have a free licensing tier if your lyrics site included their ads, which were for a scam ring tone subscription service that would trick users into a ringtone "subscription" billed to their mobile carrier. The ads promised MIDI ringtones on every lyric page, but usually they didn't have them for more obscure songs.
No source that I'm aware of provides a public API
mp3 is patent-free as well, as far as i know.
> "July 26, 2016 updated April 8, 2021"
Seems to be about this specific article.
It's even possible to use it as a source for internet radio stream using some other software (butt & voicemeter) and lot of black magic.
^1 Example: https://www.maketecheasier.com/assets/uploads/2020/03/Apple-...
Completely offline, almost every feature you need, supports tag editing and displays lyrics from the metadata too.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.krosbits.mu...
The lib supports:
- default tags (id3 v2.3, v2.4, APEtag 1.0-2.0, m4a, ogg)
- chapters
- lyrics
- custom tags
If you absolutely need to pack the data into the audio file you can probably make a simple extractor program to read the audio file and extract the lyric data into a format that the player can read natively then feed it in to the player. Or patch the player software to support your format. The former is usually the easier option, of course.
Storing the text is the easy part. Procuring files with lyrics baked in or adding lyrics to your pre-existing library is another. And so far, almost no music player supports them, their UI isn't necessarily optimized for displaying lyrics, and there is no widespread standard for their format.
Apple Music took this feature one step further and actually provides a way to sync lyrics to the music. The UI is very intuitive as well. Not sure if Spotify offers this too.
I ended with writing timestamps with comments using Notepad.