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)