I didn’t know this existed until recently so I just wanted to share. Jellyfin recently began supporting syncing your lyrics to the music in Jellyfin, natively! It is insanely easy to set it up, too. Basically, the way it works is you need a specific filetype *.lrc
(that is basically a timestamped text file) which already has the lyrics and timestamps in it. You give that lrc file the same name as your audio file and Jellyfin will automatically read that as the lyrics. It is that easy.
You can get lrc files a bunch of different ways but all of them involve retrieving them from the same database, lrc.net.
- You can go to the website and manually pull them (probably time consuming though).
- There is an official package for mass-downloading these lrc files. Don’t expect 100% accuracy but it’s pretty damn good, maybe an error rate of 10ish percent. This is what I use.
- The Jellyfin team is working on an official plugin, but caveat emptor, it is still a WIP.
- There is this pretty slick script for MusicBrainz Picard. I’ve tried it and it works well if you want to use tags. Reading timestamps within the
lyrics
tag isn’t supported by Jellyfin yet, but it probably will be in future releases.
Imho, this is a really big feature and I hope 3rd party clients start supporting it soon! If you know of any 3p audio clients that support synced lyrics, please comment them!