I’d like to suggest to the Roon team to consider linking available lyrics from studio albums to live albums where lyrics are not currently available for the same artist. Arguably, the same lyrics could be used for versions which are part of compilations, best ofs, anthologies, etc. that don’t have lyrics as well.
Example: The song “Sorrow” on The National’s “High Violet” album has the little lyric icon showing with the ability to view lyrics, which is great. However, the 9-Album box-set by the same band entitled “A Lot of Sorrow”, where the band played the same song 99 times in succession at the NY Museum of Modern Art over a 6-hour period, doesn’t have lyrics available for any of the tracks. Both the “High Violet” and “A Lot of Sorrow” albums show each other as related performances (i.e. I have a local icon with 101 instances and a Tidal icon with 2 more) so Roon is aware they’re the same song and I can personally attest that the same lyrics are used on each and every track. With that being said, I think the source of the lyrics at the top-left of the lyrics panel should still specify that it came from the correct studio album.
I recognize the risk that the lyrics may not be identical on all live performances of all songs but I’d imagine they rarely significantly deviate from the original enough to matter (although, I know I can think of more than a few songs where the live versions have different lyrics). Without published lyrics for the songs, I’d always prefer the studio-version lyrics to nothing at all.
Now, to be fair, I’d also be OK with all performances that don’t have lyrics – even by different artist doing cover versions – to have the lyrics from original album versions, but that might need to be a user selectable option as I could see some people not being particularly fond of that choice.
Or is there some sort of meta-data licensing issue with using the lyrics for other versions of the song? Maybe there’s more to this than that of which I’m aware. Either way, that’s my suggestion today.
What do you think?