I have always enjoyed having lyrics for my music. Unfortunately, lyrics don’t automatically come with song downloads or from ripped CD’s. Having lyrics on an iPod has worked from my original iPod Video all the way up to today’s iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. Lyrics on these current iOS devices is very useful since you can just tap on the screen when in portrait view and then scroll down while the song is playing. But how do you get the lyrics on to the device?

iTunes Info

iTunes stores all kinds of additional information about the songs and other media in your library. You can easily edit the information yourself by right-clicking on the track and choosing Get Info. You can get to the same information by going to the File menu and choosing Get Info or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd-I on a Mac or Ctrl-I on Windows.

Now that you are in the Get Info dialog you will find a Lyrics tab. In the Lyrics tab you can type the lyrics in yourself or more likely you will paste them in from another source. You can use Google or Bing to search for the lyrics of the artist, title or album in whatever combination you like. Just make sure you put lyrics in the search. Be careful with some of the sites that come up. Many like pop-up windows and hope you’ll click somewhere. Also make sure the lyrics are accurate. Since individuals have submitted them the quality can vary.

A good choice for accurate lyrics is Lyric Wiki. There used to be a number of programs that could link into Lyric Wiki and automatically download the lyrics into iTunes. Unfortunately, the music industry doesn’t want you to do that and the site had to limit the very useful programming links to keep the site up. The programming links will only return the first few lines of the lyrics and not the whole thing. Today, the site has lyrics that are very accurate including the official lyrics from the music publishers. The catch – you can’t copy them to easily paste them into iTunes. However, you will see an Edit button next to the song title. If you click on Edit you will be able to copy the lyrics from the editing screen. I do recommend the site because it is accurate, reliable and doesn’t try to trick you into clicking something bad.

TunesTEXT

I will do the above copy and paste method if I have to but there is a quicker way if you have a Mac. TunesTEXT is a free Dashboard widget that can look up lyrics and paste them into iTunes automatically. After you download the widget from the site it will either ask to install automatically or you can just open the file and it will ask to install. Dashboard will ask if you want to delete it or keep it. Click on Keep and place it on your screen. You can exit Dashboard with the esc key or by clicking on the background where there is no widget.

To go back into Dashboard you can click on the Dashboard icon in the Dock if you haven’t removed it or open your Applications folder and then open Dashboard. Many Apple keyboards also have a key for Dashboard along the top row. My older MacBook Pro isn’t labeled but F12 brings it up. On our iMac, the keyboard is labeled and it is F4. On my son’s newer MacBook Pro it is labeled and it is also F4 like the iMac.

To use TunesTEXT, open iTunes and play a song you want to get lyrics for. Go into Dashboard and with any luck, TunesTEXT will search for your song and come back with the lyrics. That’s all there is to it – if it finds it. Current songs will likely be found whereas songs off the beaten path may not. I would also check the lyrics it inserted. There have been some I got that were definitely wrong. Since this widget is using some of the same sites you would have searched for through Google or Bing you will have similar accuracy issues. If TunesTEXT didn’t find any lyrics, you are back to the first method. You can quickly move through songs and add lyrics with TunesTEXT by clicking the next song button.

No Lyrics Playlist

Ideally, I would go find lyrics every time I add music to my library. I do usually do that but if I don’t get an automatic hit with TunesTEXT, I will often skip over the track and not do the manual search.

AppleScript is a macro language built into your Mac that you likely don’t know exists. Apple created AppleScript to automate tasks within and across programs. It is very powerful and is designed to be fairly readable. If you don’t do any programming you may not agree but it doesn’t matter.

What’s important in this discussion is that iTunes has AppleScript support and there is a wonderful free site where you can get many AppleScripts just for iTunes. That site is Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. To create a No Lyrics playlist, you can download the script No Lyrics to Playlist v2.0 from the site. Installation instructions as noted from the site are:

Installation

To manually install: Put AppleScripts in your iTunes Scripts folder. This is located in [user name] > Library > iTunes. If there is no folder named “Scripts” there, create one and put the script(s) in it. AppleScripts will then appear in iTunes’ Script menu, and can be activated by selecting by name and clicking. Be sure to also save this Read Me document in a safe and convenient place.

After you have installed the script, iTunes will now include an AppleScript menu from which you can choose No Lyrics to playlist. You will get items that may not have lyrics such as books, podcasts, movie and iTunes University tracks. I like to sort the list by genre and then I can quickly remove these tracks from the playlist. There is a script available to clean the playlist of songs that you found lyrics for but I find it is just as easy to delete the playlist and have the script recreate it.

Conclusion

So obviously my first choice is TunesTEXT when I add new music to my iTunes Library. If I really want the lyrics, I will search for them and copy and paste. If there is a slight issue with the lyrics I will go in and correct them as well. Since I often skip tracks, I will occasionally create a No Lyrics playlist and try the list again with TunesTEXT. You will often get some new hits that weren’t there before.

Getting lyrics into iTunes is a really nice thing to have when you are playing back your music and now you have some great ways to get them into your library as well.