Most of us memorize melody better than words. That’s why we easily hum the song before catching the lyrics and can still hum the tune long after we forgot the lines. If you are the type of person who likes to sing along, having the lyrics displayed is better than guessing the next lines.
But if you have thousands of songs without lyrics in your iTunes library, maybe the songs that you grab from your old CDs, adding the lyrics one by one is not a fun way to fill your spare time. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. It’s called Singer Song Reader – a free Mac app that will help you search, save, and display iTunes song lyrics. It also works with Apple Music and Deezer.
Doing It the Manual Way
For the sake of comparison, let’s see how the process works manually. The first step to adding lyrics to a song is to do a search on the Internet with the search string “song+title+lyrics.” After sorting through the many results, you have to copy the lyrics (while trying to survive all the ads) and paste it into the song in iTunes.
And by pasting, I mean opening iTunes, selecting the song, right-clicking on the song and choosing “Get Info” (or using “Command + I”), selecting the “Lyrics” tab, pasting your search result there, and clicking “OK”.
Now imagine doing that as many as the number of songs in your iTunes library.
And to view the lyrics, you have to open the info window of the song – one song at a time.
Doing It Singer Song Reader Style
With Singer Song Reader, the above process can be shortened into one. After downloading and installing the app, all you have to do is to open it while playing your iTunes song as usual. Singer Song Reader will automatically search for the song lyrics from many lyrics sites, pick the most relevant one, insert the lyrics into the song, and display the lyrics in the app’s window. All of these steps are done automatically without any interference from the user.
If the song played already has the lyrics attached to the file, Singer Song Reader will not overwrite it, so if you’ve been inserting song lyrics manually until now, you don’t have to worry that your hard work will go down the drain.
Adding lyrics automatically while you are listening to the song is fun. But you can do it in bulk if you want to with the help of the “Control -> Batch Processing” menu (“Command + 0”) – that’s a zero, not the letter “O”.
Select the songs that need lyrics from iTunes, and use the Batch Processing menu/shortcut to process them.
Let the app do its job while you enjoy your free time by singing along to the songs you love.
A Little Bit of Preferences
As always, let’s take a peek into the “Preferences” menu (“Command + Comma”) to find further possible customization.
The first tab is “Search”. This is the place to set how long the app should try before declaring timeout – both for automatic and manual search. You can also set your iTunes store location from here.
The second tab is “Save” which allows you to set where you want to put your lyric folder and several other tiny adjustments related to saving.
The last tab is “Sites” which lets you select/deselect listed sites that will be used to find lyrics.
To me, Singer Song Reader is the kind of useful little app that does one thing and does it very well. If you know other alternatives to lyrics search tools, please share them using the comments below.
Image Credit: State Library of New South Wales
Jeffry Thurana is a creative writer living in Indonesia. He helps other writers and freelancers to earn more from their crafts. He’s on a quest of learning the art of storytelling, believing that how you tell a story is as important as the story itself. He is also an architect and a designer, and loves traveling and playing classical guitar.
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