Apple files patent for synchronized lyrics display

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.)

Yikes! I hope my synced talking storybooks don't violate Apple's patent!
http://www.smartduck.net

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.

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

Oh, woops, sorry, that was from her first album…

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 ;)

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.

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.

speaking of Volta, wait until this thing tries to parse lyrics from The Mars Volta... it'll be time to kernel panic!!!

I'll be interested to see how this avoids the trap of prior art.