a friend of mine has been playing around with iTunes lately, and has passed along several neat little tricks that enhance the overall experience. i’ve been a little pressed for time of late, so messing around with this stuff hasn’t been top priority, but i took some time to dig into this one and thought i’d share.
ever since iTunes 5, your music library has supported lyrics, which is super cool when you’re listening to music on an iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch, whatever…the problem is, who in their right mind is going to go through hours days worth of music, search for lyrics, hit command I, and copy and paste into the lyrics tab on a song by song basis?
no one in their right mind.
luckily, someone created a dashboard widget called harmonic — which when active will quickly search the web for lyrics to the song that’s playing, and update iTunes automagically. OK, this gets us halfway, but letting your music play for days on end could be tedious, let alone annoying if interruptions should occur.
another stroke of luck comes in the form of an applescript called needle drop (thanks, doug!) — cue this bad boy up and it will allow you to play a specific length of each track (10 seconds of every song in a playlist cuts down the process considerably).
one more thing. harmonic is far from perfect. in fact, it’s fairly flawed. another option that seems to have better luck at locating lyrics is a little app called GimmeSomeTune. despite it’s groan inducing name, GimmeSomeTune actually works quite well. it even pulls down album artwork, and plugs into last.fm, so it’s got that going for it, too.
anyways, spent some time messing around with this, and the verdict is that it’s well worth the time spent. train rides will now have an added diversion — reading lyrics to songs.
anyone else have some tips to share?
[update: i just noticed that in the description of the flickr photo i used, there is the recommendation of another dashboard widget called Name that iTune. i haven't tried it, but it could be worth checking out.]
