Sorry if this is a dumb question but how does offline lyrics work? Can you store them in the metadata?
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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It is not a dumb question at all. I asked my self the same question a few months ago. You are correct. It is essentially just metadata. You can embed them with something like kid3 directly into the music file it self. So for example I have a .lrc file(the sync lyrics file). It will look something like this:
[00:16.60]Through your terribly fragile heart.
[00:24.70]Even the secret of the red fruit is, "I'll give it all to you.
[00:32.90]Even though I'm still hurting your leaky heart
[00:40.50]I still see your dream
[00:44.00]A person whose beauty that can’t be achieved whose beauty can’t be achieved…
[00:51.80]I want you to love me, I want you to love me ...
U can just copy the text in the .lrc file and then write it into the music file with a lyrics tag with something like kid3. If u open the music file with a music player that supports it, u will get synced lyrics. The process is quite tedious to do manually, so I made an app to download audio from YouTube videos and embed the subtitles as lyrics to do it for me (yes, this is a shameless plug). If you are interested, you can check it out. Azul box
Very cool, thanks!
Sayonara is the one I'm using.
I use Musicbee and just followed a forum tutorial to install it on linux
i use termusic. It has a lyric section, but I never used it
edit: added link
Thank! I tried it today. It is quite good. I would probably use it on my laptop.
If you need it for Android, I tried quite a few. I had the same requisites, offline, lyrics for flac files, I ended up using Metro: https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.muntashirakon.Music/
Very minimalist and do the job very well. I use the field "Composer" to sort my lists.
Thank you for the recommendation! I will give it a try if I have time.
Quod Libet
Strawberry
I use Swing music player. It's web based and plays in a browser. It's not super featured like subsonic but good enough that it works for me.
Thank you, it look gorgeous! I will give it a try.
An alternative would be to run gonic or Navidrome - both are OpenSubsonic servers, and provide synced lyrics support. Then use the ostui client which plays music and displays synchronized lyrics.
That sound like a lot of work, but it seem really fun! I may try it when I have time.
It's not, really. All of those programs are Go, and single executables. There's no "install" for either gonic or ostui (IIRC, also Navidrome): you download or compile the executable and run it, and you're off and running.
Someone mentioned Docker; in this case it's unnecessary unless you're doing it for security. They're just each a single binary. You'll have to either create a config for gonic or Navidrome, or run them with commands telling them where your music lives, but that's it. Running on the same machine, you don't even have to open the ports on your firewall. However, if you do, Tempo for Android lets you stream the music to your phone from gonic or Navidrome, too.
These are very, very simple programs to run. ostui is a TUI, so if you prefer GUIs you'll want a different client, but both of the servers are easy to run and nothing to install - just run them as you, not even root.
If you're familiar with docker you can have it up and running in ~5 mins.
Yep, but only if you familiar, otherwise it can range from 1day to a week depending how complex our setup is (OCID,Fail2ban,reverse proxy, self-signed miniCA...).
But once your setup is all ready and you get all the bell and whistle it's just a matter of 5mins (and very fun too if you have time to spend !)
Another client that works really well with navidrome is feishin. Also capable of showing lyrics
Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass.
I think rmpc can do this too, which is an mpd client with album art support, but it's terminal based and requires some manual configuring. I've been buying CDs over the past couple of years to get rid of streaming as well, and i think i'm finally ready to cut the cord. I've been experimenting with different music players but ended up ditching mpd. I like to be able to switch between audio outputs easily, like alsa or pipewire, and since mpd is configured through a config file it kinda sucks for that. I also like to be able to play CDs directly, eventhough i have ripped them all, but i haven't been able to get any terminal player to play a cd, except for mplayer, which is too minimal for my taste. At the moment i'm really liking audacious. Also tried deadbeef and strawberry, but deadbeef doesn't have mpris support ootb, and strawberry feels a bit bloated to me. Audacious feels like a nice middleground. Audacious does support viewing lyrics but not synced from what i can tell unfortunately.
Thank you for your insight, strawberry, audacious and mpd are all amazing software. The problem is that synced lyrics is really important thing for me(a jpop listener, that don't know Japanese). I am pretty sure that I can probably get the lyric to work with somekind of mpd frontend. Mpd seem to be really fun. I may just make a frontend for it for my own use-case.
Been using Jellyfin to host my music and Finamp to play it, Lyrics are pulled from https://lrclib.net/ using a Jellyfin plugin, certain lyrics are timestamped allowing for synchronization other are just static.
I wish PlexAmp did this so I could recommend it