Hi-Res Music Playback Software: Lyrics management

[mck22mck]

Hi. I am nearing the end of a project to rip my CDs to .flac files using dBpoweramp. I have been using Foobar for playback from a computer and I'm happy with it as far as it goes. But I listen to a lot of vocal music, both world music and "classical", that has lyrics in foreign languages I don't understand. All of my CDs have translations in the booklets, and when my collection was small enough to spin the discs I would read along with the music. Now, I'm under family mandate to store the CDs pretty much out of sight.

Is there a piece of playback software that can manage and display lyrics on the computer screen? Ideally, I'd love something that could search online, open databases and download the translations of lyrics for me , but I would gladly settle for just a way to automatically display files through the software's management database that I have I downloaded or scanned myself.

Any advice on how better to handle this problem would also be welcome, but a 4+ figure$ dedicated player wouldn't be helpful.
Thanks for any replies.
Mike

 

[lovinthehd]

Following but don't think I've seen that meta data particularly passes along things such as lyrics at all..... but find using the internet for such fine, and never in the recording istself

 

[Eppie]

I've played around a bit with MiniLyrics. It can hook into some players and displays lyrics in a floating window on Windows PCs. I've used it with Windows Media Player but have not tried Foobar. I originally tried it because I am a fan of Band-Maid and while some song translations (from Japanese to English) were available the software did not have access to the full catalogue. If there are multiple translations available or the lyrics are both original and translated, you can manually choose the file.

Roon also offers karaoke style lyrics but availability is hit and miss. For Band-Maid, I found that Roon only displays the lyrics in Japanese and not translated to your local language. That's a feature that users have been asking for but unlikely to see any time soon. Roon is pretty expensive, though, and best suited if you have multiple systems in-house and want software that integrates those systems under one interface.

 

[mck22mck]

Thanks. I just now downloaded MiniLyrics through CNet and will try it over the weekend.

 

[Clab]

Hi. I am nearing the end of a project to rip my CDs to .flac files using dBpoweramp. I have been using Foobar for playback from a computer and I'm happy with it as far as it goes. But I listen to a lot of vocal music, both world music and "classical", that has lyrics in foreign languages I don't understand. All of my CDs have translations in the booklets, and when my collection was small enough to spin the discs I would read along with the music. Now, I'm under family mandate to store the CDs pretty much out of sight.

Is there a piece of playback software that can manage and display lyrics on the computer screen? Ideally, I'd love something that could search online, open databases and download the translations of lyrics for me , but I would gladly settle for just a way to automatically display files through the software's management database that I have I downloaded or scanned myself.

Any advice on how better to handle this problem would also be welcome, but a 4+ figure$ dedicated player wouldn't be helpful.
Thanks for any replies.





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Sounds like you’ve built a great setup already. Since you’re ripping to FLAC and using Foobar, one practical option is to scan or download the booklet translations and embed them as tags or attach them as images/PDFs to your files. Foobar can display lyrics if they’re stored in metadata or pulled via plugins, so you could paste translations there for easy access while listening. Another simple approach is keeping a synced folder of booklet PDFs and opening them alongside playback it’s not as seamless, but it keeps that read along experience without needing the physical CDs.

 

[Eppie]

Sounds like you’ve built a great setup already. Since you’re ripping to FLAC and using Foobar, one practical option is to scan or download the booklet translations and embed them as tags or attach them as images/PDFs to your files. Foobar can display lyrics if they’re stored in metadata or pulled via plugins, so you could paste translations there for easy access while listening. Another simple approach is keeping a synced folder of booklet PDFs and opening them alongside playback it’s not as seamless, but it keeps that read along experience without needing the physical CDs.

I have added lyrics via tags to get around the limitation in Roon. It displays untranslated lyrics (Japanese music displays the lyrics in kanji) so to display the lyrics in English I had to search for translated lyrics and use the proper tags (Room requires a specific format) and then set up Roon to override default lyrics with localized versions when available. It takes a great deal amount of time though, which is the biggest drawback. Nice things with MiniLyrics is that if the lyrics are on the web, then displaying them is pretty much automatic.