Filed under: Audio, iPod Family, Multimedia, Rumors
Apple files patent for synchronized lyrics display
If there's one music player feature that never seemed to catch on, it's showing off the lyrics of a given song. The record companies quibbled a little bit about cover art, but now even iTunes will provide you with cover art, and yet lyrics are still confined to ad-laden websites trying to hide from the copyright brigade. Music players gained a little ground earlier this year when Gracenote won the ability to distribute song lyrics, but so far only Yahoo Music has taken them up on the offer (and who uses Yahoo Music anyway, right?).Apple is getting there, though. According to Ars Technica, they've applied for a patent to "dynamically" show text on the screen of a portable media device while the media is playing, specifically synchronized lyrics. They also mention two ways of doing this-- either scrolling the text across the screen (which seems like a strange setup, but might work), and the more standard method of distinguishing one part of the text from another-- in other, less legal words, the bouncing ball technique.
Either way, I've never seen a good implementation of showing lyrics in a music player (the last time I messed around with it was a plugin for Winamp however many years ago, and of course in that case you had to get them in there yourself). If anyone can tell you what the hell Björk is supposed to be saying on her latest album, hopefully it's Apple.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Alex McKee said 3:16PM on 7-20-2007
LOL, nice rip on Björk Mike. This would honestly and truely rock.
Reply
Jon said 3:19PM on 7-20-2007
I probably wouldn't use the lyrics feature in the player but a lyric search option in iTunes would be very useful.
Reply
Absent One said 3:37PM on 7-20-2007
That would be a nice feature.
Right now I use a few dashboard widgets to get the job done. But native app support would is much more desirable.
Come on, you can't understand Bjork? And of all the albums you selected Volta. There are many more albums from her that are much harder to understand. :-)
Reply
Chris Karr said 3:43PM on 7-20-2007
I'll be interested to see how this avoids the trap of prior art.
Reply
schlomo said 3:50PM on 7-20-2007
speaking of Volta, wait until this thing tries to parse lyrics from The Mars Volta... it'll be time to kernel panic!!!
Reply
Ruben said 4:02PM on 7-20-2007
I use the lyrics feature on my 2G Nano very often, although i dont fetch lyrics myself, I use an app for that.
Reply
Mike Schramm said 4:19PM on 7-20-2007
Hey I like Bjork. A lot. I just have no idea what she's talking about.
Reply
Absent One said 4:20PM on 7-20-2007
That would be a nice feature to have built in.
Right now I use a few dashboard widgets to get the job done. But native app support would be much more desirable
Come on, you can't understand Bjork? And of all the albums you chose Volta. There are much harder albums to understand than that one.
Reply
Simon Arch said 4:22PM on 7-20-2007
The real problem with those lyric sites is that they all seem to copy one another, so if one has the wrong lyrics, they all do. I get lyrics from SongMeanings dot net, which is a great source, but all the lyrics are user-contributed, so they're frequently either incomplete or full of typos, or both. A single, consistent (and authoritative) source would be excellent, especially if they were offering lyrics for every (or nearly every) artist.
I don't generally care about having the lyrics at my fingertips, but when I want them, it would be nice not to have to go digging around on the Intartubes to find them.
Reply
ecobore said 5:40PM on 7-20-2007
Ah, we all remember PearLyrics - that wonderful little utility that automatically downloaded lyrics to our iTunes library in the background until the music companies got ridiculously upset about it... Surely now is the time for a resurgance of this great utility. As the record companies have become more relaxed over DRM free they may well be convinced that being able to sing along to their songs is not a capital crime!!! PearLyrics can still be found on the internet even though the developer was forced to remove it from his site.
Reply
Íslandsvinur said 6:14PM on 7-20-2007
Það var í næturlestinni í Kairó
þar sem eg hitti arabadreng sem síðan aldrei úr huga mér hverfur ...
Ég elska hann
Not that hard now, is it ;)
Reply
Íslandsvinur said 6:15PM on 7-20-2007
Oh, woops, sorry, that was from her first album…
Reply
Karim said 10:38PM on 7-20-2007
I actually liked the implementation of the display of synchronized lyrics in Windows Media Player:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/knowledgecenter/howto/AddLyrics.aspx
It's just that adding synchronized lyrics was so tedious, I only did it for one song.
Playing the song with lyrics was fun, though -- and I liked the fact that the lyrics were embedded in the song. Well, it was fun right up until I switched to iTunes, which at the time had NO lyrics support at all... LOL
Reply
GrizzlyAdams said 10:57PM on 7-20-2007
Stepmania (while not a generic music player) has synchronized lyrics. If the examiner doesn't find prior art on their own they are a moron.
Yes I know the patent office hires morons.
Reply
Anthony said 11:02PM on 7-20-2007
Yikes! I hope my synced talking storybooks don't violate Apple's patent!
http://www.smartduck.net
Reply
mark said 3:09AM on 7-21-2007
imagine a line of text (lyrics), and as each word is heard (sung), that one word becomes larger -- just for the duration of that word. then it returns to normal size as the next word "swells" -- all in time with the lyrics.
(think safari 3 beta's "search" function -- the orange blobs. but each word would stay "popped" longer than in safari.)
Reply