Monday, May 6, 2019

LRC Support

Not sure how widely supported LRC is. Not much, I guess, as I don't see it mentioned much anymore. IIRC, LRC files came out pretty much soon after MP3 was introduced. Nowadays, it's not so easy finding LRC files for songs.

For those who  don't know what I'm talking about, LRC is basically a specially-formatted text file that allows song lyrics to be displayed in sync with the music. For example, a folder/directory would have song.mp3 together with song.lrc. When song.mp3 is played on an LRC-capable MP3 player, it would also display the synchronized lyrics within song.lrc. An LRC file is basically a collection of text entries - a timestamp in brackets, followed by a line from the song. Sort of like SRT for video files, though SRT is more complicated.

On the PC, my default MP3/OGG player is foobar2000. LRC support is through an extension called Lyric Show Panel 3. It can automatically search for, display, and optionally save timestamped (LRC) or text-only (TXT) lyrics. On my Android phone, I used to have HikiPlayer as my default music player. Recently switched to Musicolet when I found out it supports LRC files. Simply tap on the album cover image to display the lyrics. By default, Musicolet displays the lyrics embedded on the music file. Change the settings to LRC if you have LRC files and want to display synced lyrics instead.

My Hisense smart TV also has LRC support for music files. However, Chinese lyrics shows up as weird characters. Strange that it can't decode Chinese LRC files properly because the song title and song artist (also in Chinese) are displayed onscreen just fine. Tried looking for character-encoding settings to change, but didn't find any. Hopefully this is fixed is some future firmware upgrade.

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