Have you ever found yourself missing the lyrics for a song in your iPod, but you don’t want to go search and add lyrics manually to each song in your iTunes library? Then this is the app for you!

It can update the lyrics field in iTunes for the currently selected songs, automatically. The lyrics are fetched from the lyricwiki.org website, which has a pretty good library of songs, even though some of them have been obscured by a copyright claim.

This is how to use it:

Step 1: select some songs in iTunes

Select some songs in iTunes. (you can use command-a to select all songs on screen)

Step 2: open MassiveLyrics and hit the Get button

The lyrics have been looked up

The app will start looking up songs on the internet. If the lyrics are not available it will be shown, otherwise you’ll see ‘lyrics found’

Step 3: push Write all found lyrics to iTunes to update the songs in your library

Just the songs in the ‘lyrics found’ state will be updated in your iTunes library. Song state will be updated to lyrics written.

Each of the previous three steps will take some time, depending on the size of the selection you’ve made. Please be patient while it loads

Step 4: enjoy!

You will find the newly added lyrics in the get-info dialog of your iTunes songs, under the lyrics tab, and next time you’ll sync your music player they will be copied and available also on the go.

Download massivelyrics v1.1

I have tested the app for some time on my mac, and it works fine.
However it is provided AS-IS and I cannot be held responsible for any damage it may make.
If you download lots of lyrics with this app, please consider buying me a coffee donating a small amount through the button in the app. Thank you!

Apple did not do a fair thing here: I watched in horror the screen turn progressively white, while hastily trying to power off the device. I couldn’t make use of the software switch and so I had to watch with even more horror the phone get warm and stay on until I came home from work (50 minutes).

Damn… there should be a hardware switch to turn it off… and iPhones should be waterproof too. I mean what is the use of having a compass inside? Make it waterproof instead. These would be killer features I think…

However to turn it off I picked up one of the many disassembly videos and followed the instructions carefully. The phone eventually did turn off, when I unlatched some cable inside, and this nice picture is what I ended up with.

my iPhone dissection results: click to see bigger

I hope I will be able to put it back… just to disassemble it was pretty hard. For now it is soaked into rice, so that some humidity will go out, especially  from the screen. I do not expect miracles, however it is worth a try, while waiting for the iPhone4 here in italy…  wish me luck!

UPDATE: I tried to revive the phone… unfortunately when I reassembled the motherboard to the display it got quite hot and no image popped up on the screen. I have to go for the iPhone 4. Or the 3GS maybe. For now I stick with my ancient nokia 6110… not quite what you call a smartphone, but it’ll do for now.

Yesterday night I was so frustrated by my widget not working anymore that I had to find a solution. The workaround was very simple indeed: the lyricwiki.org lyrics pages have the author and the song title embedded in the URL of the page, with little or no difference from the previous REST method to access lyrics.

Check out the posts of the dashboard widget and the massive lyrics script for updates: I’m going to fix them soon so that they work again!

• simple lyrics widget: dadelyrics
• massive iTunes lyrics download script

The  only difference is that the output is now a full-fledged html page, and not the plain text of the lyrics. To strip the output some more ruby processing is required, basically a call to parse the DOM and extract the node with lyrics, plus some cleanup of the xhtml markup after the node is retrieved. But in more simple words it works again!

Ruby has proven itself again simple, elegant and powerful: look at this one-liner:

doc.root_node.find_first_recursive {|node| node.name == "div" and node.attributes["class"] == "lyricbox"}

It parses the html output and extracts the node with lyrics thanks to REXML, which comes bundles with ruby. Bliss!

Seems that the ban from music producer has little or no effect, unless they will decide to put down the site completely, but that is not likely to happen, fortunately.

lyricwiki.org REST service has been banned!

I guess this will be the end of the project, unless I can find a similar service. I think however it will always be playing the rat and the mouse between the majors and who offers lyrics APIs.

Fortunately I could download all the lyrics in my iTunes library prior to this with my massive lyrics ruby script!

Well, it’s time to update the two posts removing the download of the programs that used the lyricwiki interface. Shame!

• simple lyrics widget: dadelyrics
• massive iTunes lyrics download script

Let’s hope that new and brilliant services like the ones from lyricwiki won’t be censored anymore.

a screenshot of the widget

I built a simple lyrics widget playing around with dashcode. I’m sure there could be many improvements on the concept, but I wanted something as simple as possible to have quick and dirty dashboard lyrics.

It displays the lyrics from the current track playing in iTunes, taking them from the lyrics field.

The Lightning button will see if there is no lyric content in the iTunes song. If it is so, it interrogates lyricwiki.org and add the lyrics to the iTunes track.

in order to use the widget you have to run these commands in the terminal.

sudo gem install rb-appscript
sudo gem install curb

To have all your songs with lyrics added automatically check out my massive lyrics update script! Have fun!

I recently found a fantastic website to get lyrics for songs: lyricwiki.org
No ads and plenty of lyrics available for free, even for italian artists or pretty unknown songs. I was also pleased to discover that the website offers an handy REST interface to fetch (or upload) lyrics from scripts update: I found a workaround to retrieve the lyrics without the banned lyricwiki API: read more here.

So I coded a script to fetch and update the lyrics for the selected songs in iTunes automatically. It cycles through all the selected songs and if it finds the lyrics on lyricwiki it puts them into the corresponding field of the iTunes track. I tested the script on my whole library and – after 5 minutes – most of my tracks had lyrics attached.

For that massive update task I found applescript to be a very quirky programming language. The folks at appscript realized this long before me and coded a ruby binding for the applescript object model.
Ruby was far more intuitive, and definitely replaced the need for applescript.

If you want to run the script you should also have the appscript and the curb (for curl support) gems installed: type this into a terminal to be up and running:

sudo gem install rb-appscript
sudo gem install curb

The script is available for download both as a plain .rb file and as a self-contained application (thanks to platypus)

Usage:

1. install the appscript and curb gems (one time)
2. open iTunes and select the songs you want to fetch lyrics for.
   hint: command-a selects all your library
3. execute the script:
   either launch the application
   or run ruby MassiveLyrics.rb inside a terminal

If you feel that your iPod hasn’t been the same as before after having all your favorite songs with lyrics, contribute the lyrics they don’t have on lyricwiki.org!

MassiveLyrics ruby script (OS X – win – linux)

I knew that some hacks allowed reading PDFs on the iPhone offline, but that required having some bookmarks in safari both on the iPhone and on the Mac, or to mail it to yourself, but those methods aren’t so practical!

Instead it is possible to create handy offline webclips on your iPhone by using some simple steps!
A webclip is simply a web link with an icon that the iPhone puts among the icons in your springboard. In this tutorial we will create a webclip that instead does not connect to the internet, but displays your document right away! Let’s get started!

1) Save a dummy webclip in safari on your iPhone. This could be anything, but try to create an icon that describes the contents of the file you want to open offline. For this map i started by pointing the iPhone to the online PDF and creating the webclip. In safari tap the add bookmark plus sign and choose ‘Add to home screen’. You must have 1.1.4.

2) SFTP into your iPhone (look here if you do not know how), go into /var/mobile/Library/WebClips, and locate the webclip you just created by viewing its icon.

3) upload your file in this web page and generate a looong address. Copy it in your clipboard. This URI encodes all the information of your PDF, only in a different format.

4) edit the Info.plist file and paste in the URI in the contents of the URL key! It may take some time for your editor to do that. Textmate crashed, so I used plist editor. Here’s a sample:


...
Title
MY OFFLINE WEBCLIP
URL
PASTE THE LINK HERE
...

5) Save and upload the hacked Info.plist file back to your iPhone (should be much bigger now) and try your new offline webclip! Sooooo handy!