Feedback Requested: Importing Lyrics From File Tags

Late 2 cents from me - embedded lyrics from tags is all I would need. Personally I use beets.io for managing my source library, and that seems to find lyrics for many titles where Roon fails, especially with non-international content. So I for one am looking forward to this feature being added:+1:

Brian - I don’t agree that you would be sued by exposing a users lyrics to others. As the ex CEO of Gracenote that developed the first digital lyrics license regime and launched the first legal digital lyrics services and later, as the ex CEO of Fandom,com who had a lyrics community site - lyrics.fandom.com - that legally enabled users to add their own lyrics everyone would see - I have quite a bit of experience in this arena. I think you could be much more flexible here… Happy to discuss further if you want…

Hi everybody,

Asking the end user about lyrics has foremost one aspect and that is user experience. These are my points I would throw into the ring.

  1. When the synchronised lyrics were introduced you got me hooked and I switched to lifetime license. It is great to have lyrics displayed while listening to songs. This works well for me as my iMac that serves my music is placed between my speakers. When it will be replaced by a larger TV sometime soon, an AppleTV client for Roon would be great, but I think mirroring the iPad screen via AirPlay would also work fine.

  2. Synchronized lyrics are displayed not too small, as opposed to the non-synced lyrics which need a zoom function.

  3. Synched lyrics are not really in sync some times. A song specific adjustment possibility would be helpful here.

  4. Going into that direction, immediately raises the question for a function to make a synched version out of a non-synched one. The easiest way would be to simply take return key strokes of the user to jump to the next row and safe these timestamps. I would have nothing against it, if ROON would share this manual effort with others.

That would be my suggestions for the UX with lyrics.

Further I would love to not just get lyrics for non-classical music but also librettos for classical stuff, esp. operas but also for other choral works. E.g. Masaaki Suzukis Bach choral work is supplied with lyrics in the text books and I think that the record label BIS might be interested to provide lyrics for their backcatalog.

With this addition, ROON would be in a very singular position in the market.

Greetings,

Christoph

I’m curious about current status of supporting lyrics from file tags. Is it supported by Roon or not at the moment and if not, is it going to be supported in near future?

I added the lyrics on a file where Roon doesn’t seem to have found lyrics for and added tag LYRICS to it and nothing happens, no ‘mic’ icon right to the song’s file indicating it has lyrics available. Also added .lrc file with same name and location as the song’s file name in .aiff file format, still nothing happens within Roon.

Using TAGS for Lyrics should be great, especially for minor genres and languages.
Please consider using standard format for SYNC Lyrics formatting.

@mike you mentioned this time-stamp format:
[mm:ss:msms] Lyrics I want to be displayed

but the common LRC format is:
[00:12.00]Line 1 lyrics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRC_(file_format))
with special tags for author, album etc.:
[ar: *Lyrics artist* ]

Why this non-standard behaviour?

For many users with TAG editors like FooBar2000 + Lyric Show 3 plugin could be natural to simple use existing things …

When I used Squeezebox and iPeng I could see the lyrics in the tags. This was over ten years ago.
I was very dissapointed when I found out that not even Roon is capable of this.

I encourage the team to import the LYRICS tag, with the same limitations as for the other tags.
Definitely a must have for a future release, imho. :slightly_smiling_face:

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You should make a feature request if you have any new ideas how to change the current behaviour. Please read also: Lyrics in Roon.

Capable of and being legal are two different things. A lyric is a copyrighted work from songwriter(s) and if you respect copyright takes the proper license. Roon choses to do things they are properly licensed for and therefore not subject to lawsuit. Squeezebox and iPeng chose different paths.

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Wait a minute: Music is a copyrighted work, too. Group/artist/albums pictures and photos are copyrighted work too.
Does this mean that Roon should not process any music, for that matter ? Or not allow album covers or artist photos ? Obviously not. The copyright user is responsible for any licence.
Same applies to lyrics: It’s the user who is responsible for the copyright, not the software that allows displaying lyrics. Nor are television hardware/software makers responsible of the copyright of the films that I watch… How could that be ?

Well, as someone who ran a company (Gracenote) that was the first company to work with music publishers to create licenses for the digital use of lyrics, I do have some experience. There are books and classes galore to teach all the ins and outs of the arcane and complex world of music licensing. But a few points can be made here:

You can be sued for facilitating copyright infringement (your not the primary infringer, but you enabled secondary infringement) so it is NOT true that a company like Roon has no liability because the user carries all of it for the things in their collection. That is an uneducated viewpoint and just not true.

If you run a website you have cover for displaying copyrighted works you don’t have license for through the DMCA which enables an infringing web site the opportunity to take the infringing work down if notified by the copyright owner and thus avoid lawsuits and penalties. Roon is not a web site so has no cover under DMCA.

Roon already licenses artwork, band photos, bios, reviews and lyrics to be clean for the things that they provide. So then it comes down to what the company does for the things a user might load (artwork, photos, lyrics, etc) that their licenses don’t cover and how much risk a company is willing to take.

For artwork, in general, as long as a company has a license (and Roon does), labels (who in general own all the artwork and won’t go to the legal mat on artwork like they do for the actual music) don’t mind if a company loads artwork from a user which may include works not covered by their license – although they’ll never put this in writing – so the risk here is very minimal.

Band photos a user uploads could be owned by the label, the band or a random photographer or that photographer could license companies like Getty Images to sell and be the agent for enforcing copyright. Roon already licenses band photos and since the ownership is so scattered, loading photos from a user which might not be covered by their licenses carries small risk unless Getty comes calling (and they are not a super litigious company) but that isn’t likely unless your a big company and Getty determines you are using lots of their photos. Roon is likely not on their radar.

Lyrics are a whole different ball game. The labels don’t own them, the music publishers own them and they are generally very litigious. The publishers will often wait until they see many similar infringing companies (which means there is enough money to be made that it is worth it), and then pick one or two and sue. They will win the lawsuit or force the company to settle or go out of business and then everyone that is similar to those companies have to license. For many years, there were lots of illegal lyric web sites, but then the publishers sued a couple of them and now almost all commercial web sites license. Roon is licensed for the lyrics so in most cases publishers will look the other way on you if you are loading lyrics from users (which will very likely include lyrics that aren’t covered by the license) but given the litigious nature of music publishers there is real risk here for a company like Roon. Especially when the penalty can be up to $150K for a single lyric infringement that is willful which it likely would be if Roon built functionality to load and display lyrics from users that weren’t licensed.

If Roon did chose to load lyrics from users, to be safe, they would likely need insurance for copyright infringement which is expensive and may not even be provided if the company offering it doesn’t think Roon is doing enough to prevent it. Given all this, it seems Roon’s choice is to not take any risk and not load lyrics from users. Other companies make other choices and take their chances and there are no lack of companies that no longer are in business because they made the wrong copyright choice (anyone remember Napster?). But it is not true that Roon has no risk because the user carries all of it and therefore is just currently choosing not to allow it.

I can admit that, given that

Still, this sounds a lot like a risk management issue, not a copyright one, the way you put it ?

It is risk management of copyright infringement.

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