[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Along with tags and cover arts, lyrics are also highly sought-for and widely used metadata, particularly with non-English folks who would like to know the lyrics of the songs they listen to.

Of the three mobile platforms I currently support (Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian), two (WM and Symbian) have players that are able to display lyrics; BlackBerry, currently, doesn't. Note that the, in most respects, best player on the supported (currently, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and, at least in the near future, iPhone) platforms, CorePlayer, will only receive support for lyrics in the far future (at least a year or even more) - around version 1.6.

On Windows Mobile, in addition to the excellent, albeit a bit outdated TCPMP, four, otherwise not really top-of-the-line players can show lyrics while playing. One of them, LCG Jukebox, also exists on Symbian - with exactly the same features. On the latter operating system, it's only this program that is capable of displaying lyrics. (Again, this will change when CorePlayer receives lyrics support - but that's still waaaay off.)

1.1 Lyrics formats

First, you need to know what lyrics formats there are. They are as follows:

separate (!) TXT and LRC files using the same filename as the original song file. That is, for example, if the song is named Madonna - Material Girl.mp3, then, the accompanying LRC / TXT file - in the same directory - must have the name Madonna - Material Girl and the extension LRC / TXT, respectively. (For example, Madonna - Material Girl.lrc should be the full name of the song.)

Of the two formats, LRC is the far more advanced and widely supported, mostly because of the metadata (among other things, timestamps for correct time synchronization). You can find a decent tutorial on the features LRC files offer for example HERE.

Note that LRC isn't THE solution for everything newer, even more sophisticated lyrics containers support; for example, it lacks built-in bi/multilingual support.

built-in, inline (non-separate) tag-based lyrics. There are three kinds of them. For techies, the best source explaining the three major in-song (tag-based) lyrics format is ID3.org. The links to the respective documents (along with a quick summary): ID3v2 (not only a lyrics storage format, but also stores all kinds of other info: the traditional artist / genre etc. fields coming from the two pre-v2 versions of the ID3 standard), Lyrics3 (a heavily outdated format not recommended because of its severe restrictions) and Lyrics3v2 (this is the, along with the - independent - ID3 v2 standard, is the currently used best approach.) In my compatibility chart, I also provide explicit info on the compliance with all these three formats. These can be both synchronized (with timestamps; also see the LRC files) and non-synchronized.

Of the former group, LRC is compatible with all the lyrics-capable players and allows for time synchronization, which may be pretty important for several users. The latter, which is superior in practice (you can't easily lose your lyrics if you forget to transfer the separate LRC file along with your main song file) is only compatible with one: MiniLyrics, only on Windows Mobile. Fortunately, the, if you can live with the very infrequent nagging screens, free (!) MiniLyrics, which also has a plug-in compatible with almost all the desktop players (the most important exception being Videolan VLC), offers conversion capabilities between LRC and inline tags.

1.2 Creating lyrics

You can easily create a TXT or LRC file (of the latter, even a synchronized one) without any external, specialized editor or tool - just a plain Notepad (or any other basic file editor) will suffice. This, of course, won't work with the tag-based (built-in) lyrics format because you'll need an application including your lyrics in the file. Fortunately, most common desktop multimedia players allow for doing this. For example, the way it's done in the stock Windows Media Player (WMP) 10+ is explained in the Add Lyrics to Music Files tutorial. (As this tutorial is pretty well written and easy-to-follow, I won't elaborate on doing this in WMP at all.) The already-mentioned free/"nagware" MiniLyrics is also highly recommended.

As with most WMP library-related functions, lyrics editing is pretty restricted even in the latest, version 11 of WMP. Sure, you can edit even synchronized text and save in an inline format MiniLyrics (on Windows Mobile) is compatible with, but it's roughly all you can do. On the desktop, there are several add-ons or plug-ins (like MiniLyrics) that heavily enhances this functionality like adding lyrics search capabilities. (Note that all the reviewed mobile players also allow for online searches - with varying degree of success, though. More on this later.)

1.3 Available players

Note that I've published a review of two of the four Windows Mobile apps HERE. In the meantime, however, new versions have been released of both apps and, therefore, I found it necessary to re-do all my tests to find out whether there are any notable changes or enhancements (unfortunately, not much).

1.3.1 Lyrics Magic

(current, tested version: 2.1)

This, it seems, discontinued (for example, the lyrics searching database doesn't seem to be any more maintained) player is not recommended because of the high price (while clearly the best two players, TCPMP and MiniLyrics, are free; so is the rather simple WinVibe), the incompatibility with inline tags and, of course, the non-working search engine.

Note that "Open File" uses the default file selector dialog; if you dislike this, you can safely use a third-party tool like my favorite, FileDialogChanger by Mad Programmer. If you dislike both approaches, use "Open Folder" instead.

1.3.2 WinVibe

(current, tested version: 4.9.6)

(The text window can be made bigger by further clicking it but still individual lines will be shown, meaning you won't see almost anything of the context)

The lister screen for non-synched LRC files (and to see / scroll the entire text at once):

This is a free player. It has a bit high CPU usage (in which LCG Jukebox is clearly the best - at least in the lyrics player group; still, it's a far cry away from the best titles in this respect; for example, CorePlayer) and rather rudimentary, textual-only lyrics display (as opposed to the smooth, much more spectacular, small-character scrolling of the other titles). It, most of the time, also failed at online searching - as opposed to the two best titles in this respect, LCG Jukebox and MiniLyrics. (This, of course, will only be an issue if you do want to search for the lyrics of a given song on your handset and not on your desktop. In most cases, you'll want to do the latter while maintaining your song library; that is, bad support for online searching isn't that big an issue.)

1.3.3 LCG Jukebox

(current, tested version: 2.30)

(VGA, Windows Mobile)