Is there a way i can automate the process of adding lyrics to my mp3 tags?

March 16, 2007 6:24 AM

Is there a way i can automate the process of adding lyrics to my mp3 tags?

What I want to do is be able to set a program to automatically add the lyrics to music add to my Itunes library.

These are downloaded tracks from various sources all in cd quality mp3 320kbps/VBR average bitrates of 250-320.

I chose itunes for its ability to quietly folder and volume level my music without damaging the files.

I've tried that program called the godfather but their howto's seem broken. If anyone has any ideas on how I can do this it would be great.

ps. if anyone has a howto on taking the itunes album art and applying it to the actual mp3 tag that would be wonderful. I have 10,000 or so tracks on my computer so doing this track by track would take many months of many sundays.

posted by Chamunks to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I have thought about doing this but not got round it it. At present I use Mediamonkey rather than Itunes since I find it rather better at tag management. Mediamonkey users have developed some scripts that work with third party tools such as EvilLyrics . My concerns in taking this approach would be that you end up with a database of music that plays nicely with your ipod but which Itunes is no longer able to fully read. I would also be concerned that a number of tracks have rather low quality lyrics files with errors in them.
posted by rongorongo at 7:18 AM on March 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

True enough, It is allot better than nothing though being as i have so many songs and dont trust any group of people to do the work for me. Mediamonkey you say, will that sync up to my ipod and sort the folders aswell? Thats mainly what attracted me to itunes no other program I've found seems to do that. I would take any program over one that supports DRM anyday.
posted by Chamunks at 7:32 AM on March 16, 2007

Ok, after further looking into it it does sync up to ipod's but what about the folder structure.
posted by Chamunks at 7:33 AM on March 16, 2007

Ok, it does do foldering :P Tu Che
posted by Chamunks at 7:43 AM on March 16, 2007

Just in case MediaMonkey doesn't work out for you, you can actually do everything you're asking with iTunes and a couple of small utilities.

For album art, Tunesleeve plays nicely with iTunes and embeds album art in the tags. Just check the option that lets Tunesleeve overwrite any album art that iTunes already found (because iTunes stores album art in a separate database, not in the tags like you want).

For lyrics, Otto's page of iTunes Javascripts includes a script that will import lyrics from EvilLyrics into iTunes.
posted by somanyamys at 7:47 AM on March 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

Thanks a tonne everyone keep these good ideas rollin. This has been a very helpful day this has been something I've been stuck on for over a year. Being as music is one of my obsessions I don't feel to privy to screwing with my music with testing proprietary solutions. Once again thanks a tonne.
posted by Chamunks at 7:57 AM on March 16, 2007

How much space would music and lyrics for 10,000 songs occupy? (Not that it matters, if they're all really high bitrate...just curious.)
posted by nevercalm at 12:52 PM on March 17, 2007

100 gigs or so... but i have some Flac files that i dont think i will be keeping...
posted by Chamunks at 9:31 AM on March 19, 2007