I’ve used several utilities to fill the Lyrics field of my mp3 library with varying results. There are always songs which lyrics are not found.
So I came up with this couple of extensions for Alfred to speed up a bit the process of retrieving lyrics.
There are two extensions:
- Find Lyrics: (fl keyword) which takes care of launching Safari to make a Google search of the track title + artist of the current track playing in iTunes
- Set Lyrics: (sl keyword) this will copy the current content of the clipboard to the Lyrics field for the track that was searched before
You just have to invoke the first extension when you are listening to a song for which you need to get the lyrics, find the right source for the lyrics in Google results, copy the text and invoke the second extension.
These extensions are made with Alfred v0.9.10 which means you have to provide a parameter when calling the extension… any string will do, it is simply ignored. In Alfred 1.0 you’ll be able to call the extensions without parameters. I’ll make an update to the extensions once Alfred 1.0 is out.
Note: The Find Lyrics extension save a txt file in your /tmp directory to have a reference to the current track in iTunes (it uses the database id field to be sure to work on the right track) and the Set Lyrics looks in this file to know where to put the contents.
You can download the extension here (zip file).