Finding the Lyric Timings

    Finding the timings require loading the music file into a sound editor and reading the timestamps at which each lyric begins. We like to use Audacity. It’s a fantastic program for editing sound, with lots of features, and it’s free to download and use. If you don’t have a sound editor already installed with timestamps, we recommend downloading Audacity.

    With the sound editor running, import the music file into the editor. Scrub across the timeline to the beginning of each lyric and note down its start-time. You can note the times on the MiniLyrics’ Lyrics Editor or note it down on a text editor of your choice and then copy the lyrics into the MiniLyrics’ Lyrics Editor after you’re done.

    When you finish noting down the times, you don’t need to save or export the song file out. Just close the sound editor since we only used the program to grab the times and didn’t do any editing to the music file itself.

Using the Lyric Timings

    With the timings noted down, you can either create an external .LRC lyrics file from them or embed them directly into the song. Saving them as a separate external .lrc lyrics file will mean you’ll need to either store the .lrc files in a directory where you’ve set MiniLyrics—or any other media player capable of playing external lyrics—to find them or manually locate the lyrics yourself.

    If you choose to embed them, it will give you the freedom to play the song and display lyrics on media players that support embedded lyrics without having to define the directory of the stored external lyrics. We like to embed the lyrics for that reason.

In case you don’t wish to embed them, we’ll write about saving the lyric timings as .LRC file as well as embedding the lyrics into the music file.

Creating the External .LRC Lyrics File

    There’s really not much to creating the .lrc file. If you’ve noted the lyrics timings down on a text editor, like Notepad, all you need to do is:

1. Click “File > Save As…” on the text editor’s menubar

2. Type the name of the file follow by the ‘.lrc’ extension. (Do make sure the “Save as type” is “All Files” else you’ll get something like “lyrics.txt.lrc” instead of “lyrics.lrc”.)

3. Click “Save”.

    If you’ve noted the timings down into MiniLyrics’ Lyrics editor, do the following:

1. Click “File > Save Lyrics As…” in the MiniLyrics’ Lyrics Editor menubar

2. Type the name of the file

3. Click “Save”.

Embedding the Lyrics into the Music File

    Before we begin embedding the lyrics into the music file, we like to make a copy of the music file as a precaution. We’ve never had anything bad happen to the file, we didn’t corrupt the file or lose the file, but it’s always good to know that if something horrible happens, we know we have a back-up.

    On to the embedding. If you’ve added the times directly into the MiniLyrics’ Lyrics Editor, skip the first five steps and go straight to step 6.

1. Open/run the media player with the MiniLyrics plugin if it’s not already opened. (We use VLC player.) Hopefully the MiniLyrics window also pops up. If it doesn’t, you may not have installed the plugin for your player.

2. Load the music file into the media player with the MiniLyrics plugin. You can go to the directory and double-click the music file or you can go to the media player’s File menu and open it.

3. Play the song if it’s not already. (Playing the song will ensure that we are adding the lyrics to the song we want and not some other song in the player.)

4. Go to the MiniLyrics menubar. Bring up the Lyrics Editor by going to “View > Lyrics Editor…”

5. Copy and Paste the lyric timings into the lyrics editor.

6. Still on the Lyrics Editor window, embed the lyrics by going to “File > Save Lyrics in Song File…”

7. A dialog box will pop up (see picture above), asking which format you wish to save it as. Select the appropriate format for the kind of player you use. We like to select the one for Windows Media Player since we use that program as well. With MiniLyrics plugin installed, the embedded lyrics will show on the VLC player. (We assume with MiniLyrics installed, any of the options will display lyrics.)

8. Click “OK”.

Till next time!

Ever since we watched a childhood friend perform on the classroom piano, we’ve liked the piano. There is something cool about it. We can’t quite pinpoint what that something is though: maybe it’s the beautiful sound it creates or the way it can evoke emotions in the listener when played expertly or maybe it’s the skill of mastering the piano we look up to, we’re not too sure. What we do know is that for a long time, we’ve been trying to read up music theory—or rather we’ve attempted to read up music theory so that we could begin to learn to read music (and not rely on video piano tutorials to learn songs) and play more songs on the piano.

    Up till recently, we’ve failed to learn and understand sheet music. Past searches online came up with information that either didn’t go far enough, went much too far that it brought on headaches or wasn’t focused enough. We’ve let it be for a while now and accepted that perhaps we were never going to be able to understand sheet music (and play all those songs from TV series we wanted to play); but then we had this idea of searching the iTunes Apps store. There’s all kinds of useful things in there; there’s got to be someone who’s developed a great app to help people learn to read sheet music.

    There was: we found three developers of apps that finally helped us learn and begin to understand sheet music. (Never be defeated! : oP : oP) Though the apps do not cover everything there is to know, we were able to pick up at least one piece of sheet music and understand it from beginning to end.

    If you’ve been wanting to learn to read sheet music and found online material confusing or didn’t go far enough, we recommend giving the first three apps—if not all four apps—a try. Together, they cover a wide number of topics in music theory, rhythm and sight reading. (Note: they are all paid apps, but they are worth the purchase.)

1. Music Theory for Beginners by MusicRoom
This app covers quite a lot of important areas in music theory. Some of the theory it covers include: treble and base clefs, accidentals, time signatures, expressions, slurs, ties, repeats and pickups. When you finish reading, you’re led to the quizzes where it’ll get you to answer multiple choice questions on what you’ve read; sometimes it’ll get you to play on the piano or it’ll ask you to tap on a drum to test your rhythm. We found that this app included exactly the kind of information we’ve been so confused about whilst reading websites. The information is concise and just enough to get us to understand many of the symbols and notations on sheet music.

    There are some things that appear on sheet music that isn’t discussed in the app. For that, we returned to the Internet. We really like using Wikipedia’s List of Musical Symbols.

2. Sight Reading HD by Super Kiddo Studio
SightReading+ is a great app to help increase your speed in reading notes. It is an app that will display notes on the staff and you are required to press the note on the piano below. There is a progress tracking feature so you can see how much you have improved in accuracy and speed. We went in search of this app because we found that our speed in reading notes is incredibly slow. (The Music Theory for Beginners app which we recommended above does test your sight reading, but we found the timer which it had on was not very effective in helping us learn the notes we weren’t familiar with.)

3. Rhythm Sight Reading Trainer by Rolfs Apps
Rhythm Sight Reading is a fantastic app to help get you acquainted with rhythm and tempo. It’s a really simple app (it looks simple, too), but it really helps you get an understanding of the note lengths. What you are presented is a piece with notes (and rests) and you are required to tap the piece on a drum. You will have a metronome to keep you in time on the side. This metronome, you can change the tempo so you can get an idea of how speedy a piece is when you come across a piece with the tempo noted in the score.

4. Pianist Pro by MooCowMusic Ltd.
Pianist Pro is a piano that we downloaded for the iPad to practice on. This app is not necessary to help read music since it doesn’t have any information, lesson or quizzes. It’s just a piano for the device that you can sheet music on. It’s sort of hard to play the left-hand and right-hand together on the piano on an iPad, but it is helpful when one wants to practice one of the hands. This app does have a record feature, so when you get really great with reading music, rhythm and tempo, you could use it to record the right side then the left side and then store the song. (Pretty cool if you get that far!)

There must be a better alternative to learning the lyrics to favourite songs than having the music playing in the background and having the lyrics either opened in a web browser on your computer or printed on a piece of paper. Wouldn’t it be so great to be able to open a song and have the lyrics display on the screen whilst you do your work on the computer so you can sing along with your favourite songs? We found this cool plugin called MiniLyrics that does just that.

    MiniLyrics adds lyrics to many popular media players and applications: the list includes Windows Media Player, VLC Player, iTunes, WinAmp and Spotify. It’s a cool piece of add-on software. You simply download the MiniLyrics plugin, select the players you wish to use it with, install it then load the songs. (You may need to go into the player’s option/preferences to turn on the MiniLyrics. For a more detailed setup and installation, go to MiniLyric’s Help page.)

    Many of the songs will then automatically load with lyrics without you having to search them out. Upon loading the song, the MiniLyrics plugin will do a search of their database for lyrics; so you won’t have to manually search for them and load them into the player. If you find the timing is a bit off or there’s a mistake in the lyrics, there is an internal lyrics editor that allows you to correct these mistakes.

    The database which MiniLyrics draws upon is very big. We found that not only were there lyrics for English language songs, but also Chinese, Japanese and Korean songs, which is fantastic! We did come across songs that the database returned no results; so we had to create our own lyrics file (in .lrc format). Creating a lyrics file can be done using the MiniLyrics’ internal lyrics editor, too.

    The coolest thing about MiniLyrics is the way it displays lyrics. There is an option where you can display the lyrics anywhere you want on the screen. How this works is the MiniLyrics window will pop up upon launching the player. The lyrics are displayed on this window which you can move to any area on your screen.

    After a short moment, this window disappears and all you’re left with are the lyrics. If you set it to scroll and remain on top of all applications, you can continue to work, surf the Internet all the while sing along to your songs.

    Pretty awesome, right? We think so. The only thing is, it is a free-to-try software. To get it fully activated, you must purchase an activation code. We downloaded the free-to-try version and it appears to have all features activated. Whether some of these features will become inactive after a certain period of trial, we can’t tell. There also doesn’t appear to be any mention of a trial period… We’ll have to keep using the free-to-try version and see how long the free-to-try period is.