How to add lyrics to your iPhone, iPod touch songs
Here’s a neat iTunes feature you might not know about. iPhone or iPod touch owners can easily add lyrics to their favourite songs to read while listening to music. Here’s how to do it.
Anyone born in the ’70s (or earlier) might recall listening to vinyl records and reading the lyrics on the album sleeve at the same time.
Personally, I have fond memories of lying on my back in bed with huge headphones and holding up the sleeve to read lyrics to albums by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, The Cars and Kiss.
While CDs often shipped with booklets, it lost some of the magic with vinyl.
But if you own an iPod touch or iPhone, you can take advantage of a feature in iTunes 9 that lets you drop in lyrics to songs and view them on your portable device while listening to the song.
In fact, you can flick your finger up and down to scroll quickly through the lyrics, too.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Pick a song in your iTunes music library and right mouse-click over it. Choose Get Info (the first option).
2. Now click the Lyrics tab and you’ll see there’s a space you can paste some lyrics.
3. Launch your favourite search engine and type in the name of the song followed by the word “lyrics.” You should see a few results. Click one.
4. Copy the text from the website and paste it into the Lyrics window in iTunes. Now click OK.
5. Synchronize your iPhone or iPod touch and when you play that track on your device you’ll see the lyrics appear on the 3.5-inch LCD screen. Follow along or use your finger to flick up or down to go backwards or forward, respectively.
Enjoy!
This is the most useless drivel, filled with typos.
ridiculous sympatico.
poor poor content!
Um, what typos?
I’m the author of this blog post and I’m curious about what typos you found?
Cheers,
Marc
Dear Marc,
I didn’t write the original complaint, but there is some fairly sloppy writing. If you are actually interested, here is an explanation.
“While CD’s often shipped with booklets, it lost some of the magic with vinyl” Shipped is a past participle, not a transitive verb, and it needs an auxiliary. “it” has no clear antecedent. The structure of the sentence suggests that “it” refers to the act of shipping. “lost some of the magic with vinyl” – So vinyl was out walking about with shipping, and together they lost some magic. I think that qualifies as drivel.
cheers,
Lindsay
Now if only there was a way to automatically get the lyrics and synchronize into iTunes.
Love lyric info. Thanks Marc. Do you know if it works on iTunes on our computers? Tried adding lyrics to one song, but cannot see any option to play lyrics while listening on my computer. Any plans you know of by apple to make it work on our computers?
Hi Mary,
Happy New Year!
Unfortunately, no, I don’t know how to see these lyrics in iTunes on your PC while the song is playing (other than clicking on the Lyrics tab), but works great on iPhones and iPod touches.
Best,
Marc
Hi Marc,
I followed all the steps right up to pasting the lyrics into the space provided. I have sync’d my iPod Touch, and when I play the song, it shows the artwork, there is a tab in the top right corner that looks like a page with lines on it, when i touch that, it switches from the artwork to the songs by that artist (in this case, the one i had added lyrics to, and one more). I am not getting the lyrics on my screen :S
By the way Marc, I have to comment that I enjoy reading your articles, and if I was to ever find it to be filled with “useless drivel” I would merely move on to another site. I am not sure I have enough time in my day to actually write to the owner of that site and make comments as Fedup did. The expression “Keep your comments to yourself” would apply here. :)
“I am not sure I have enough time in my day to actually write to the owner of that site and make comments”
you do & you did.
““While CD’s often shipped with booklets, it lost some of the magic with vinyl” Shipped is a past participle, not a transitive verb, and it needs an auxiliary. “it” has no clear antecedent. The structure of the sentence suggests that “it” refers to the act of shipping. “lost some of the magic with vinyl” – So vinyl was out walking about with shipping, and together they lost some magic. I think that qualifies as drivel.”
Wow, some English prof just sounded smart on the interweb! While technically correct in an overzealous forensic analysis of the case, I would have to respectfully disagree that such minuscule grammar mistakes (only obvious to a language elitist) would qualify as drivel.
I understood the content. Perhaps the English professor should read the lyrics of a song some time for a clear example of what drivel might be.
“So vinyl was out walking about with shipping, and together they lost some magic.”
This, on the other hand, I could not decipher.
Could you explain please Lindsay? Perhaps English majors are the only ones who can understand such grammatical similes.
Thanks Patti and Twitch,
While I welcome constructive criticism, calling this blog post “drivel” because of a minor grammatical mistake is a little over-the-top, no? Maybe if Fedup and Lindsay spent a nice New Year’s Eve together they’d have something better to do than write such comments (and slam Symaptico) over a small error. Hopefully, most readers of this blog post will find this tech tip a useful one!
Happy new year, guys!
Best,
Marc
P.S. Patti, I just tested this on an iPod touch (by following the step-by-step instructions) and it worked the same as my iPhone. If it doesn’t work for you, please let me know.
Wow… and I thought I was tough on writers for their poor understanding and use of the English language. Still, Lindsay is correct. Just for the record Mr. Saltzman is one of the better bloggers I’ve read, with a light, breezy style and, on the whole, he makes few ‘ENGRISH’ mistakes.
Moving along… On my desktop system I use Winamp as my music player of choice. Among the many (thousands of) plugins available are a few used to display lyrics and even to sync them to the music, almost Karaoke-style.
Happy New Year to all,
Marc C.
Thanks, Marc! Appreciate the kudos.
Love the spelling of your name, too! ;-)
Best,
Marc
Well, Bells Hells, I might as well add to this love hate fest. I am usually a stickler for proper writing especially using Canadian spelling as opposed to American spelling. As one born long before the 70’s I fully understood the intention of the written blog right through. Also noting along the way that vinyl is coming back into vogue, as it is a much better listening medium in that it records all the high and low ranges of the music as originally played.
“Happy New Year Marc, and keep up the great work.”
Not Always Perfect,
Phil
Sorry lost the context of the blog, great tip works supper as I can watch the lyrics while running on the treadmill.
Thx tons Marc this is a great tip too bad it will not sync with my BB Storm.
Thanks, Phil. Appreciate the kind words.
The “Slacker” music app is supposed to come to Canada soon and it supports the BlackBerry. You can choose to read lyrics while listening to music with this app.
Happy new year,
Marc
Ok, this is all fine and dandy if the a fore mentioned Lyrics tab showed up in the songs that I want to add lyrics to. I have searched the internet for a good hour now looking for one scrap of info to help me with this.
Hello Marc!
Thanks for posting this, I had no clue you could incorporate your lyrics…
I know it’s a little late but after playing around with this feature I think I have the answer to Patti’s problem… she just needs to tap the screen when the song is playing… The artwork will fade out and the lyrics will appear. If she decides that she wants the lyrics to go away and just look at the artwork then all she has to do is tap the screen again…
At least, I think this was her problem : )
Thanks Sara!
Marc
Thank you Marc for posting this info! I found it very helpful and can now get to know the words to songs without having to write them down like I used to have to do with vinyl.
p.s. sorry you have to put up with immature negative comments about spelling etc. I guess they have nothing better to do with their time.
Thank you so much!This is so helpful!Now I can enjoy it everyday.