Import Lyrics to iTunes Fast!

Holy Cow!  I have spent hours finding lyrics online, copying them, then pasting them into iTunes so they’ll show up on my iPod.  Sometimes you just really want to know the lyrics.  But with 3000 songs in my library, this project has turned out to be very time consuming. 

When I ran across an article about LyricSnapper on JAMM I got excited and tried it out.  That software has you play a song for just a couple seconds, then it is supposed to get the lyrics and import them when you terminate the song.  However, even though it’s free, I found it to be wildly unstable.  Sometimes it would pull the lyrics from LyricWiki, but it wouldn’t add them to the id3 tags.  Often it would freeze up, forcing me to shut it down. 

So I searched and found a great solution called iLyrics.  This one allows you to get lyrics in batches.  Check it out:

When you right-click on a song you get a menu.  Choose Get Info.

Above: No lyrics.  Yuch.

Above: Open iLyrics.   Looks like the iTunes icon.

This software gives you the option of updating automatically or manually.  By checking Update Automatically, you can choose multiple songs, as opposed to individually updating lyrics.  I will warn you, however, that good as this software is, sometimes problems arise.  So don’t try to update too many songs at once.  I found that updating up to 50 songs at a time was fairly manageable.  It only takes a half second or so per song.

Above, I selected the 51 Queen songs I just imported into iTunes.

When you press Get Lyrics, it opens up a window that looks like records in an Access Database.  It then starts updating songs.  So far so good.

Above:  The red exclamation point marks songs where lyrics could not be updated.  Perhaps the title is not spelled correctly, or the lyrics simply may not exist in the LyricWiki database.

Above is an example of an error in the program.  Most of the time I could press OK and it would continue.  Sometimes the program had to restart.

If a song already has lyrics you can have the software either overwrite them or leave them alone, simply by checking the appropriate box.  Here’s what the software looks like when it skips songs that contain lyrics:

I found that iLyrics generally averages about a 70% success rate, which is pretty good.  That still leaves me with alot of manual updating, but not nearly as much as I would’ve had before. 

The software is free and easy to use.  I found it to be very intuitive.  But I recommend that you don’t update more than 50 songs at a time, because if the software runs into a problem, it freezes and displays an error.