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Plus: Lyrics on Our Jukebox

Lyrics of most popular songs are acquired from the Internet, stored in the jukebox, and displayed on the remote control when requested.

Lyrics displayLyrics display
(This image is shown at reduced scale for ease of viewing)

Acquisition

Lyrics are available from many Internet sites. Clearly there's a considerable amount of work involved in finding and extracting the lyrics. Where possible this is done automatically in the Database Converter program, as part of the process of adding new CDs to the jukebox. The Database Converter searches the web for lyrics and extracts them from the resulting web page if any are found. Often they cannot be found automatically, so some manual effort is required. The program for this purpose is the Advanced Lyrics Editor in my experimental jukebox (using the [Edit] link in the illustration above), which allows me to search the web for lyrics using artist name and song title, or excerpts.

Storage

Lyrics for each track are stored as simple text files in the same directory as the music files. For instance if the music is in file

M:\Jukebox Music\Popular\Grateful Dead\American Beauty\09 - Attics Of My Life.wma

the corresponding lyrics are in

M:\Jukebox Music\Popular\Grateful Dead\American Beauty\09 - Attics Of My Life.txt

Display

The track listings on the Details tab provide a [Lyrics] link to display the lyrics of any track where the lyrics are available, on the Lyrics tab. Alternatively, clicking on the song name in the player section (right-hand, white section) of the display puts the Lyrics tab into "Auto Lyrics" mode, in which the Lyrics tab automatically displays the lyrics of the song that's currently playing. The Lyrics tab also provides the [Edit] link, which on the main household server allows simple text editing for the correction of errors.

Lyrics editorLyrics editor

On my experimental server the [Edit] link provides access to the Advanced Editor described above under "Acquisition".

Lyrics editorAdvanced lyrics editor