Anyone know of an online lyric database that I can get to pragmatically? I'm not above a bit of scraping if need be, but I'd prefer something cleaner - and I want somewhere that explicitly states that programmatic access is OK. I don't want to rub anybody up the wrong way.
I'm thinking of putting together something to display the lyrics of whatever I'm listening to in iTunes. Catching the events that tells me what's playing seems to work OK. Here's my proof of concept - show_playing_track.py. The next stage will be to actually retrieve the lyrics from somewhere.
I did look at EvilLyrics, but that seems to bugger iTunes up on my PC. Besides, it's more fun to write my own. ;-)
BTW, I've cleaned up convert_tracks.py a little, and made it a little more robust. It doesn't choke on read-only files now. Is there a cleaner way to write enable files in Windows than os.chmod(filepath, 0777)? That 0777 is nasty.
(See Batch iTunes track conversion with Python and COM for more about convert_tracks.py.)
Posted to iPod by Simon Brunning at February 23, 2005 01:17 PMI just saw a reference to this moments before reading your post, so I have no idea whether it's any good, but...
http://www.philocode.com/minilyrics/index.htm
I once used a webservice provided by http://lyrictracker.com/. It provided results in an easy to use XML format. It was rather nice. I am not sure they still provide it, but check it out. It was free at the time.
Posted by: g8rgeek on February 23, 2005 02:27 PMMiniLyrics looks cool. I do like the way if highlights the current line. But I really want to write my own.
Lyrictracker refers to a SOAP interface on its stats page, but I can't find any other reference to it...
Posted by: Simon Brunning on February 23, 2005 03:28 PMI thought the problem with most lyric sites was that they could be potentially shut down for copyright issues (which I always thought was dumb).
Or is that a non issue these days?
Dan
Posted by: Daniel Berger on February 23, 2005 04:47 PMNothing to do with lyrics, but try this out for size:
Once you register and download the plug in, it will keep count of every song you play, forever. Each song registers in some huge central online database somewhere and this builds up into a summary of what people are listening to. So you can check what people are listening to in Outer Mongolia, say. (Answer; the Beatles and someone called Michelle. But there are only seven of them and somehow they have an average age of 70 years and six months).
http://www.audioscrobbler.com/place/Mongolia
Funky.
wow your comments system is shit.
It objected to the word scr@pe because it included r@pe.
http://www.lyricsfind.com
That's my blacklist, Merkin. I've had some *really* nasty comment spam. :-( I'll fix my blacklist so that it only objects to the 'r' word if it's in a URL.
Thanks for the lyricsfind link. I'll take a look.
Oh thank the Lord for that (figuratively speaking) - now I finally know the lyrics to Teardrop. "Feathers on my breath" eh? Who'd have thunk it.
Posted by: Katherine on February 24, 2005 10:54 AMInfo on lyrictracker's SOAP interface here:
http://www.lyrictracker.com/soap.html
That's fantastic, James. Thanks.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on March 9, 2005 09:00 AMCheck www.corpris.com for a freeware Lyrictracker client for mobile phones. You can also download it at http://www.getjar.com/products/3716/LyricTracker
Man, the guys at lyric tracker are very NON RESPONSIVE. I am writing a .NET tool and I have uncovered massive data issues with their db. Invalid characters that completely invalidate their XML and they have yet to respond if they plan to scrub their data. If you plan on using this db as your source, good luck and expect to write a lot of data scrubbing code.
Posted by: Troy Morvant on January 10, 2006 07:19 PM[Here's for hoping you read this!]
I'm scripting iTunes using Python, same as you did.
[Before your mac]
Is there any way to retrieve the lyrics from the track object in python?
I'm just a novice scripter and failed googling it or doing it myself.
Thx for answering..
["Your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: y@hoo.com", the questionable content being my email address. Lol!]