This statement doesn’t convince me to belief that the implementation of an automatism wouldn’t lead to the display of wrong lyrics in other peoples libraries.
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The advantages of displaying original lyrics far outweigh the ‘risks’ (if you stretch the concept). Many of the lyrics I’ve witnessed already have small deviations from the actual song, so displaying small errors is nothing new or particularly disturbing.
But, if a user has an “unusual” cover song with mangled lyrics, or if the user has a particular penchant for accuracy, that user would always have the ability to embed the altered lyrics in his/her tags.
This would include foreign language versions as well. A user’s lyrics would always supersede the originals.
So there really isn’t much to fear with this request.
Maybe that should be an iterative process … first: read lyrics from tags at all, second: see (and discuss) what else could get done. Locally sharing lyrics between performances is IMHO a second; not saying it couldn’t work.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to let the user do the song matching and embed their own lyrics? That way they are in control of accidental mismatches, rather than sone Roon software that can’t be overridden.
Maybe. I’ve got about 30 versions of Good King Winceslaus (sp?)
Wanna stop by and have a tagging party? 
Seriously, the prospect of “lyric error” is overblown and easily fixed.
I wasn’t thinking you’d do it by hand. Clear opportunity for a little Python script.
Just to make sure, I’m not against this. Just against automated attempts to do that.
Also if you play a song without lyrics where you have other interpretations of with lyrics (can be more than one), Roon could present these other lyrics for view/review and give the user the option to take over a specific one if he/she wishes to.
Since I don’t know Python or his/it’s scripting, I’d have to do the hand edit. But however much time I’d spend on this project, I’d rather Roon did it for me.
Roon has already populated one performance with lyrics; I’m just asking that it extend the courtesy to all performances of the same name by the same composer(s).
Right. And I’d be asking that it doesn’t. Too much chance of invalid results. Very hard to tell if two tracks are of the same composition, in the general case.
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AIF have ID3v2
How hard can it be, if the track name and composer are the same, almost certain it’s a match.
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So, I was thinking that there were some canonical pieces which would live up to what you aver; say Beethoven’s 9th or the “M.T.A.” song. But it turns out that Kingston Trio hit version of “M.T.A.” changed the lyrics, because an earlier recording with the original lyrics caused some furor. But both versions had the same composer and title. And of course in Leonard Bernstein’s 1989 recording of the 9th at the Berlin Wall, he changed the lyrics from Beethoven’s “Freude! Freude!” to “Freiheit! Freiheit!”.. And try figuring out what the actual lyrics of an old folk song are, like “Lily of the West”! I’ve got recordings of Ella Fitzgerald singing Great American Songbook songs where she twists the lyrics amusingly. Heck, the latest revival of “Kiss Me Kate” has revised the lyrics composed by none other than Cole Porter to better suit modern sensibilities.
I checked my collection for copies of “Good King Wenceslaus”, by the way. No hits. I do have one copy of a song called “Good King Wenceslas”, though I’ve seen it spelled both ways.
Corner cases to not the argument make.
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In non native english speaking countries it’s not uncommon for artists to release their songs not only in their native language, but also in english for the international market.
Also many popular compositions got there lyrics translated to all kinds of languages over time – some even more than once (for reasons Bill_Janssen already pointed out) for a specific language. Depending on someones residence and taste, one of these might be better known to her/him than the original.
IMHO that’s too much to talk about corner cases any longer.
@brian - would it be too much to ask if Roon would also read Comments (COMM) and maybe Description (desc) file tags and show those in addition to the allmusic description / review? I mean - if your team is implementing the read from Lyrics tag logic “half” of what’s needed for Comments would already be there, wouldn’t it; borrowing some more from what the Now Playing Screen does for cycling through content and it would almost be done …
(It might not be that simple, but still …)
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No, no… no more than terse dismissals.
The point is, these are not corner cases. Beethoven’s 9th and “M.T.A.” were hidebound warhorses, examples I chose exactly because I thought lyrics propagation would work for them. But when I looked into it, turns out it wouldn’t. Turns out performers really like to play with lyrics.
But hey! John_V (and now you, evand) is the one asking Roon to spend extra team time to implement a “feature” which I’m pretty sure would turn out to be a painful mistake, and is only tangentially connected to the topic of this thread. Not me. So perhaps it’s incumbent on you and he to “make the argument”, and perhaps in the Features Request sub-forum instead of here.
Who cares, something is better than nothing. Most lyrics are incorrect anyhow. For your corner cases you can dump a text file with the correct lyrics for importing
I have to admit, I have some sympathy with this whole idea, and this point of view. I really like having lyrics.
But Roon already battles with serious metadata issues. Doing something automatically would only make that worse, and would only reward those who care about having lyrics, as you and I do. Those of us who are anal about having the correct lyrics, as I am, would probably not even appreciate finally having lyrics. The wrong lyrics. Automatically forced upon us by an overly simplified algorithm.
Furthermore, if Roon brings out the LYRICS tag from the track files, this can be achieved with third-party tagging systems, by those who care to. Probably could even find someone in the Tinkering group to cobble up the software to do it.
This kind of update is as easy to apply as it is to back out of - it could probably be a configurable behaviour. I’d posit that for the overriding majority the lyrics would be fine. For those tracks that have bastardised lyrics by the performer anyone could drop in a tag or a text file to import from.
I’m late responding (sorry, I don’t pay as much attention to these forums as I should).
First of all, THANKS for this effort: I have a lot of recondite material that lyricfind & its ilk are never going to know about.
I would LOVE the ability to use .lrc files.
I have a lot of art song material (Lieder, Britten’s Michelango settings, Nyman’s Shakespeare settings, etc.) & my interest is academic as well as musical, so: 1) when I’m dealing with this material I tend to have a number of reference windows up on my displays and it’s just a lot cleaner to distill lyrics into a text (.lrc) file without having to bring up a tag editor; 2) text editors have a lot more available in terms of formatting, search/replace, etc. facilities than any tag editor, and all of these facilities can be very useful in dealing with lyrics sources that are frequently garbled and corrupt (plenty of those from lyricfind as well).
Best,
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