https://cweiske.de/tagebuch/embedded-lyrics.htm
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July 26, 2016
updated April 8, 2021
* PHP does not see Authorization header
* Yet another update
* Tagebuch
Tags
* music
+ Embedded lyrics support for Rhythmbox
+ Banana Pi as UPnP music player
* tools
+ Digikam: Change rating of multiple images
+ phancap 0.4 embeds meta data
Lyrics in ogg/vorbis and mp3 files
My music library consists of mostly ogg/vorbis files, and I wanted to
store the text that is sung directly in the files.
This is mostly uncharted territory - at least for .ogg files. It took
three weeks of research to learn about the possibilities, solutions
in other file formats and problems.
* Lyrics formats
+ Standalone lyrics file formats
* MP3
+ Data storage
+ Tools to add lyrics
+ Displaying lyrics
* ogg/vorbis
+ Data storage
+ OggKate
o Stream
o Tool support
o Creating OggKate streams
o Playing files with Kate streams
o Patches
+ Unsynced lyrics in .ogg
* WMA
+ Tools to add lyrics
+ Displaying lyrics
* AAC
* Tools
+ Clementine
+ eyeD3
+ exiftool
+ Foobar2000: show lyrics 3 plugin
+ kid3
+ Lollypop
+ lyrico
+ MiniLyrics
+ Musique
+ oggz-comment
+ Rhythmbox
+ SYLT Editor
+ VLC - VideoLan Client
+ vorbiscomment
+ Windows Explorer
+ Windows Media Player 11
* Hardware
* Demo files
* Apps missing embedded lyrics support
* Conclusion
Lyrics formats
Lyrics can be synchronized or unsynchronized:
* unsynchronized lyrics is just the song text as you see it in the
booklet of a CD
It's plain text with newlines .
* synchronized lyrics is the text plus timing information, which
allows media players to show the exact line that is currently
being sung. Karaoke depends on this.
In addition to the text lines, timing information is needed - be
it for lines or even single words or syllables.
Standalone lyrics file formats
There is a huge number of different formats that allow you to store
lyrics/subtitles in separate files.
LRC
Easy to read and easy to write text-only format: One line of text
per lyrics line. Seems to be standard today for music.
srt
Very popular for movies. More verbose than LRC, but still
plaintext.
MP3+G
Binary format used in Karaoke CDs. The karaoke text is ripped
into .cdg files which must have the same name as the audio files.
MP3
Let's have a look at MP3 first because tool support is better and
there is an official standard for both synchronized and
unsynchronized lyrics.
"Official" is not really correct here; the MP3 standard does not
define how to store meta data in a file:
The MP3 standards do not define tag formats for MP3 files, nor is
there a standard container format that would support metadata and
obviate the need for tags.
However, several de facto standards for tag formats exist. As of
2010, the most widespread are ID3v1 and ID3v2, and the more
recently introduced APEv2.
Wikipedia: MP3 Metadata
Data storage
The ID3v2 standard has meta tags for both synced and unsynced lyrics:
USLT
Contains the encoding of the text, the language, a description
and the actual song text. Multiple entries allowed, which means
you can have lyrics in several language.
SYLT
Also contains encoding, language, the time stamp format (MPEG
frames or milliseconds), type and time-stamped text in a defined
format.
Tools to add lyrics
On Linux, there is kid3 and SYLTeditor (which did not install on
Ubuntu 14.04).
For Windows, you have MiniLyrics, SYLTeditor and there once was
Window Media Player 11 which could add synchronized lyrics to mp3
files.
kid3-cli can be used on the shell to add lyrics stored in .lrc files
to mp3:
$ kid3-cli -c "set SYLT='countdown.lrc' ''" countdown.mp3
Extracting the lyrics via CLI is also possible:
$ kid3-cli -c "get SYLT:/dev/stdout" countdown.mp3
Displaying lyrics
[DEL: On Linux, there is not a single application that displays
synchronized lyrics stored in the file when playing an music track.
:DEL]
[INS: As of 2021, only Lollypop supports displaying synchronized
lyrics stored in the file when playing an music track.:INS] All other
players that claim lyrics support either rely on local .lrc files or
try to download the lyrics from somewhere on the internet.
On Windows you may use MiniLyrics which reads and displays SYLT data
in mp3 files without problems.
Musique and Rhythmbox at least show embedded unsynchronized lyrics.
ogg/vorbis
ogg/vorbis is a patent-free audio codec and thus my preferred choice
over mp3.
Tool support for lyrics is nearly non-existent.
Data storage
A small list of meta data tags for ogg/vorbis is listed in Vorbis I
specification: 5.2.2. Content vector format and standalone in comment
field and header specification. In addition, the xiph wiki lists
proposed field names and links to three websites that propose some
additional ones ( 1, 2, 3). Neither of them mentions lyrics.
The topic was mentioned on the vorbis mailing list in 2006 and 2008
with the conclusion that there is no standard, one should try CMML. I
did not find any tools, example files or supporting clients for it,
though.
OggKate can be used for synchronized lyrics, and kid3 uses the LYRICS
tag to store unsyced lyrics in ogg files.
OggText was brainstormed in 2008 as well, but was never brought any
further.
OggKate
In 2008 OggKate, a format for synchronized lyrics in ogg/vorbis
files, was invented and implemented.
Kate is an overlay codec, originally designed for karaoke and
text, that can be multiplexed in Ogg.
It does not only provide plain text lyrics but also animations,
different colors, fonts and other styles.
Stream
It is not some data in a meta data tag field, but a separate stream
inside an .ogg file, accompanying the music stream (just like movie
files have both video and audio streams):
Lyrics in meta data
+----------+--------------------------+
| Metadata | Audio stream |
+----------+--------------------------+
Lyrics as stream
+----------+--------------------------+
| Metadata | A u d i o s t r e a m |
| | L y r i c s s r e a m |
+----------+--------------------------+
This has several implications:
1. When playing the file, the text is available when it needs to
be displayed.
No need to allocate extra memory for the lyrics, and no need for
additional timing information in the lyrics data.
2. Interweaving the audio and lyrics data makes it suitable for
live audio streams that simply cannot have all the lyrics
available at the beginning.
3. Adding lyrics is not simply setting a tag but breaking up the
whole file and re-assembling the whole file.
4. Extracting lyrics requires reading the whole file and
re-assembling the single pieces.
Players will need to do this if they not only want to display the
current line or syllable, but provide a glimpse to the following
ones.
The 99% standard use case - lyrics for music files of max. 10 minutes
length - does not benefit from this format. Even operas with a length
of several hours only have about 100kiB data of timed lyrics (LRC),
which is nothing for yesterday's hardware.
Another argument for streaming was made on the Xiph MIME Types and
File Extensions talk page:
If you want it without the timing, you have to store it in
headers, as streaming it will get you the text only as its
presentation time is reached.
You could do that if you were loading from a file, but that's
only a special case, so it's best to leave that text interleaved
with other streams.
A player wanting to display the entirety of the lyrics at once
would have to, if possible (eg, if not streaming), scan the
entire file to recover the text. Parsing Ogg packets is
relatively fast, so a threaded player could do this while
starting streaming a file and have the text ready in under a
second for a typical song I suppose.
I don't believe the "special case" argument; even when you're playing
the middle of a ogg/vorbis file via HTTP you still have to fetch the
beginning of the file to get information about the header and general
structure.
Tool support
Creating and reading OggKate streams is done via kateenc and katedec.
oggenc's --lyrics only works if kate support is compiled in, which is
not the case on Ubuntu 14.04.
The only tool able to display OggKate lyrics streams in audio files I
found is VLC 2.2.2, if you start playing and then select the
subtitle. (2.1.6 does not detect the subtitle stream at all).
Creating OggKate streams
kateenc from libkate-tools on Ubuntu 14.04 allows one to convert .lrc
and .srt into kate streams, which then can be muxed into ogg audio
files with oggz:
$ kateenc -o lyrics.ogg -t lrc -l en countdown.lrc
$ oggz-merge -o countdown-with-lyrics.ogg countdown.ogg lyrics.ogg
Extracting the lyrics as LRC is possible with katedec:
$ katedec -t lrc oggz-kateenc-countdown.ogg
Playing files with Kate streams
Playing kate'd ogg/vorbis files works fine on VLC, mplayer, armarok,
xine, audacious and ogg123 (even if they do not show the lyrics).
GStreamer-based applications like Rhythmbox and Totem open a new
window that looks for extensions that understand "Kate decoder", but
fail. Totem plays the file nontheless, but Rhythmbox does not. Amarok
2.8 sometimes opened that window, but also plays the file.
Patches
The OggKate author - who never left his name anywhere by the way -
provided OggKate patches for several media players:
xine
The mailing list discussion did not lead to anything as it seems.
Xine does not display kate lyrics.
mplayer
The patch was rejected; the mplayer authors didn't want to
support another subtitle format and preferred ASS.
gstreamer
The patch got included in 2009 into gst-plugins-bad 0.10.
Unfortunately it is not included in gstreamer 1.0 (yet), which
explains the installation popup.
Thoggen (DVD-Ripper)
The feature request is still open for Thoggen.
Unsynced lyrics in .ogg
There is no officially endorsed vorbis tag/field for unsynchronized
lyrics. The only tag in the wild I found was LYRICS which is created
by the kid3 editor and lyrico.
We can add it with vorbiscomment from a lyrics text file:
$ vorbiscomment -a file.ogg -t LYRICS="$(cat lyrics.txt)"
$ vorbiscomment --list countdown-unsync-vorbiscomment.ogg
title=Countdown aligned
artist=cweiske
date=2016
genre=Speech
encoder=Lavf53.21.1
LYRICS=ten
nine
eight
seven
six
5
4
3
2
1
0
oggz-comment can also be used to add unsynchronized lyrics to .ogg
files:
$ oggz-comment file.ogg -o file-with-lyrics.ogg LYRICS="$(cat lyrics.txt)"
$ oggz-comment -l file-with-lyrics.ogg
Vorbis: serialno 0033215013
Vendor: Lavf53.21.1
title: Countdown aligned
artist: cweiske
date: 2016
genre: Speech
encoder: Lavf53.21.1
LYRICS: ten
nine
eight
seven
six
5
4
3
2
1
0
Both Lollypop and Rhythmbox display them.
WMA
Windows Media Audio files support synced and unsynced lyrics in their
meta tags. The ASF specification unfortunately does not define meta
data tag names and thus also no meta data lyrics formats.
kid3 shows the synchronized lyrics in the .wma file with a tag name
of WM/Lyrics_Synchronized.
Tools to add lyrics
Windows explorer on Windows XP is able to add unsychronised lyrics,
Windows Media Player 11 could write both synchronized and
unsynchronized lyrics.
Displaying lyrics
No tool I tested is able to display the lyrics embedded in .wma files
while playing music.
exiftool at least shows them on cli, and kid3 notices that there are
synchronized lyrics inside - but does not show them.
AAC
The Advanced Audio Coding format is mostly used by Apple's iTunes. I
saw screenshots of the iTunes meta data editor that had a
(unsynchronized) lyrics field. I did not follow this any further.
MiniLyrics claims to support lyrics in .m4a/.aac files.
Tools
The list of tools I found that could work with lyrics embedded in
audio files, alphabetically sorted:
Clementine
Clementine is a music player that is able to show unsynchronized
lyrics from mp3 files. Does neither support ogg lyrics nor
synchronized text.
eyeD3
eyeD3 is a linux command line application that reads and writes mp3
tags, supporting ID3v1, 2.3 and 2.4.
Unfortunately it is not able to extract a single tag in a way that's
readable by other programs, and is also not able to extract
synchronized lyrics:
$ eyeD3 --verbose countdown-sync-minilyrics.mp3
countdown-sync-minilyrics.mp3 [ 258.24 KB ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time: 00:10 MPEG1, Layer III [ ~0 kb/s @ 44100 Hz - Mono ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ID3 v2.4:
title: Countdown aligned artist: cweiske
album: year: 2016
boo
track: genre: Speech (id 101)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ID3 Frames:
songname/content description (TIT2): Countdown aligned>
Hardware and settings used for encoding (TSSE): Lavf53.21.1>
It is able to add unsynchronized lyrics to mp3 files:
$ eyeD3 --lyrics="eng::ten
nine
eight
seven
six
5
4
3
2
1
0" countdown.mp3
exiftool
exiftool is the swiss army knife of meta tags. It's able to extract
data from most image, document and audio file types.
It shows synchronized lyrics from mp3 and wma files, and
unsynchronized from mp3, ogg and wma:
$ exiftool countdown-sync-kid3-id3v2.4.mp3 |grep -i lyr
Synchronized Lyrics Type : Lyrics
Synchronized Lyrics Description :
Synchronized Lyrics Text : [00:00.00].ten, [00:01.00].nine, [00:02.00].eight, [00:03.00].seven, [00:04.00].six, [00:05.00].5, [00:06.00].4, [00:07.00].3, [00:08.00].2, [00:09.00].1, [00:10.00].0, [00:11.00].
$ exiftool countdown-sync-wmp11.wma |grep -i lyr
Lyrics : ten..nine..eight..seven..six..5..4..3..2..1..0
Lyrics Synchronised : ..vsynchronized lyricstennine.eight.seven.six.5.4.3p.2X.1@.0(#
It does not show OggKate texts.
Foobar2000: show lyrics 3 plugin
The windows-only Foobar2000 supports plugins, and one of the plugins/
"components" is Lyrics Show Panel 3 (foo_uie_lyrics3).
While it claims to be able to read both synced and unsynced lyrics
from ogg and mp3 files, it does so by using its own (configurable)
meta tag, storing LRC in the tag for synced text. It does not support
SYLT/USLT tags.
Foobar2000: Show lyrics 3: Lyrics editor Foobar2000: Tag editor
Foobar2000: Show lyrics 3: Settings
kid3
The meta data editor kid3 runs on Linux and supports mp3, ogg and
wma.
It has a usable synced lyrics editor and documentation for it.
Importing LRC is supported.
kid3-qt was the only software that actually supported storing
unsynced lyrics inside ogg/vorbis files by setting the LYRICS tag.
kid3-cli is a command line tool that can be used to read and write
.lrc files from and to mp3 files.
kid3-qt: Editing synchronized lyrics kid3-qt: Editing unsynced lyrics
Lollypop
Gnome application Lollypop supports SYLT in mp3 files, at least those
that have been added by SYLT Editor, but not those by kid3.
It also reads .lrc files.
Lollypop displaying embedded lyrics
lyrico
lyrico automatically finds and downloads unsynchronized lyrics and is
able to embed them into mp3, ogg, wma and m4a files.
It does not support synchronized text.
MiniLyrics
MiniLyrics is not available for Linux.
It reads synchronized and unsynchronized lyrics from mp3 meta data,
but does not support the WMP11 generated lyrics in wma files, nor
does it support .ogg. It claims to support M4A (AAC) files, but I did
not test that.
It includes an editor for synchronized lyrics and can import LRC
files.
MiniLyrics showing lyrics for foobar2000 MiniLyrics: Lyrics editor
Minilyrics save type selection
Musique
Musique version 1.4 is able to read and display unsynchronized lyrics
from mp3 files.
Musique showing unsynchronized lyrics from an mp3 file
oggz-comment
oggz-comment from oggz-tools is able to read and write ogg/vorbis
meta tags.
See the example how to use it to add unsynchronized lyrics.
Rhythmbox
Gnome's Rhythmbox displays unsynchronized lyrics in .ogg files
because I made a patch for it.
Rhythmbox displaying unsynchronized lyrics
SYLT Editor
SYLT editor is Freeware for Windows and Linux, but it did not install
on Ubuntu 14.04 correctly.
On windows it worked, but proved to not support SYLT lyrics embedded
by other editors. It even once did not read SYLT from a file that it
wrote itself previously..
I can't recommend it.
SYLT Editor: Lyrics editor SYLT Editor: Lyrics preview SYLT Editor:
Broken import of MiniLyrics tagged mp3 file
VLC - VideoLan Client
VLC was the only application I found able to display OggKate lyrics
in .ogg files - when enabling audio visualization, the text is
printed on top of that. (version 2.2.2 worked, 2.1.6 did not)
It does not support SYLT, but you can load .srt subtitle files when
playing music with audio visualization enabled.
VLC displaying OggKate lyrics VLC displaying .srt subtitles on audio
vorbiscomment
vorbis-comment from vorbis-tools is also able to read and write ogg/
vorbis meta tags.
See the example how to use it to add unsynchronized lyrics.
Windows Explorer
Windows XP's Explorer is able to show and edit meta data of .wma
files - and it allows you to add unsynchronized lyrics. You cannot
set the lyrics language as you could with Windows Media Player 11,
though.
Windows XP Explorer tag editor Windows XP Explorer lyrics editing
Windows Media Player 11
Windows Media Player 11 was available on Window XP and Windows Vista.
To my knowledge it is the only application able to add synchronized
lyrics to .wma files via its Advanced Tag Editor.
This tag editing capabilities were removed in Windows Media Player
12, much to the dismay of users.
Windows Media Player was not able to actually display the
synchronized lyrics, which maybe was the reason for its removal. But
the removal of the lyrics editing feature from WMP means that
Microsoft officially has given up on lyrics in .wma, and maybe even
on .wma itself.
Windows Media Player 11: Lyrics editor Windows Media Player 11:
Synchronized lyrics editor
If you ever try to install Windows Media Player 11 on an old copy of
Windows XP, you'll notice that it will fail because it cannot prove
the XP installation as "genuine" anymore.
You can work around this by manually extracting
wmp11-windowsxp-x86-DE-DE.exe with 7-zip and manually executing all
the wm*.exe files.
Hardware
List of hardware music players with lyrics support:
iPod classic
iPod nano (4th gen)
Clicking 3 times on the wheel button shows the lyrics. source
Demo files
During the course of my research I created a number of audio files
with the various tools. As base I used countdown.ogg from Corsica_S's
countdown.wav but had to align it to the exact full seconds with
Audacity. Then I created a lyrics .lrc file and used the various
tools to add lyrics to it.
Audio files with embedded lyrics
Tool File Note
Source files
ffmpeg countdown.aac
ffmpeg countdown.flac
ffmpeg countdown.mp3
unknown countdown.ogg
ffmpeg countdown.wav
ffmpeg countdown.wma
Synchronized lyrics
kid3 countdown-sync-kid3-id3v2.3.mp3 ID3 v2.3
countdown-sync-kid3-id3v2.4.mp3 ID3 v2.4
MiniLyrics countdown-sync-minilyrics.mp3
oggz-merge countdown-sync-oggz.ogg OggKate
SYLT editor countdown-sync-sylteditor.mp3
Both
countdown-sync+unsync-wmp11.mp3 synchronized
Windows Media and
Player 11 unsynchronized
countdown-sync-wmp11.mp3
countdown-sync-wmp11.wma
Windows countdown-unsync-explorer.wma
Explorer
Unsychronized lyrics
eyeD3 countdown-unsync-eyeD3.mp3
Foobar2000 countdown-unsync-foobar2000.mp3
countdown-unsync-foobar2000.ogg
countdown-unsync-kid3.flac
kid3 countdown-unsync-kid3.mp3
countdown-unsync-kid3.ogg
countdown-unsync-kid3.wma
MiniLyrics countdown-unsync-minilyrics.mp3
oggz-comment countdown-unsync-oggz-comment.ogg
vorbiscomment countdown-unsync-vorbiscomment.ogg
Windows Media countdown-unsync-wmp11.mp3
Player 11
Other
countdown-sync-foobar2000-show_lyrics_3.mp3 Custom tag
Foobar2000: name
Show lyrics 3 countdown-sync-foobar2000-show_lyrics_3.ogg Custom tag
name
Apps missing embedded lyrics support
The following applications miss support for embedded lyrics:
Amarok
Bug 184325: amarok wish: fetch lyrics from the ID3 lyrics tag
since 2009
EasyTAG
Bug 769201: Add lyrics tag support since 2016
eyeD3
Issue #103: Display synchronized lyrics since 2016
GStreamer
Bug 784634: unsynchronized lyrics not extracted from mp3 files
since 2017
music player daemon
#3100: Add support for lyrics tag since 2010
Musique
Support for synchronized lyrics in MP3 files since 2016
Read lyrics from ogg/vorbis files since 2016
Quod Libet
#1989: synchronized lyrics plugin: Support embedded lyrics since
2016
Rhythmbox
Bug 463978: Lyrics reading embedded tags since 2007. I added
support for ogg/vorbis lyrics tag support in 2017.
VLC
#17207: Display mp3 synchronized lyrics SYLT tag as subtitle
since 2016
Conclusion
I'm dissatisfied with the state of embedded lyrics support on Linux.
For ogg/vorbis files - of which my music library consists mostly - I
did not find a satisfying solution. OggKate is too complex for most
needs; something like SYLT for vorbis would be better suited - or
even simply embedding LRC into a SYNCLYRICS tag.
The ID3v2 SYLT format is binary and would have to be base64 encoded,
as it is done with album art in vorbis files, too.
And then, tool support would again be missing :(
Written by Christian Weiske.
Comments? Please send an e-mail.