Separate lyric / .lrc files for the lyric plugin

[TheRedCyclops]

Some programs don't recognize embedded lyric files (jellyfin, mpv) and I can't seem to find an option to export the lyrics as a .lrc file instead of embedding them into the file in the lyrics plugin configuration. An option to do this would be very useful. Thanks.

[tremby]

I was looking for the same thing.

There's this old thread I came across which suggests scripting it, and it suggests a very small bash script.

It's not fancy and it's very slow (maybe that's fine; I don't know how much resources the LRCLib API has) but it works.

I tweaked it very slightly for my liking; this is exactly what I'm running right now:

beet ls -p | while read f; do echo "$f"; lrc="${f%.*}.lrc"; lyrics="$(beet lyrics -p "path:$f")"; if [ -n "$lyrics" ]; then echo "-> $lrc"; echo "$lyrics" >"$lrc"; fi; done

For my 10,000 song library it ran all night and half of today and is so far up to M. 😆
I bet sprinkling some gnu parallel on it might speed it up a lot, but it's probably good be kind to their server.

I realized half way through that that's saving both plain and synchronized lyrics. I'm only interested in synchronized, and it's saving as .lrc so they ought to be synced. I also want to skip songs where there's already an .lrc file. So I ended up writing this.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euo pipefail

usage() {
    echo "$(basename "$0") [-h|--help] [--] [BEET_ARG [...]]"
    echo
    echo "  -h|--help: show this message"
    echo "         --: end of options"
    echo "   BEET_ARG: an argument to be passed to the \`beet ls\` command, such as a query"
}

ARGS=()
NO_MORE_OPTS=false

while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
    ARG="$1"
    shift
    if $NO_MORE_OPTS; then
        ARGS+=("$ARG")
    else
        case "$ARG" in
            -h|--help)
                usage
                exit
                ;;
            --)
                NO_MORE_OPTS=true
                ;;
            -*)
                echo "Unknown option \"$ARG\"" >&2
                echo >&2
                usage >&2
                exit 1
                ;;
            *)
                ARGS+=("$ARG")
                ;;
        esac
    fi
done

beet ls -p "${ARGS[@]}" | while read f; do
    echo "$f"

    lrc="${f%.*}.lrc"

    if [ -f "$lrc" ]; then
        echo "$f already has .lrc file; skipping"
        continue
    fi

    echo "Getting lyrics for $f"
    lyrics="$(beet lyrics -p "path:$f")"

    if echo "$lyrics" | grep -q "\[[[:digit:]]\{2\}:[[:digit:]]\{2\}\.[[:digit:]]\{2\}\]"; then
        echo "-> $lrc"
        echo "$lyrics" >"$lrc"
    else
        echo "Not synchronized; discarding"
    fi
done

This version:

• allows passing beet queries through
• skips songs which already have .lrc files
• checks to see if there's anything which looks like a timestamp in the lyrics (i.e. it's synchronized), and if not, doesn't write a file

But I agree that an option to do this would be very welcome.