raycosm's dashboard

I got my lyrics (written by LyricMaster) to display on my iPod touch by changing the language code to "eng". LyricMaster sets the language as "XXX" when it writes lyrics to ID3 tags, and for some reason my iPod didn't play nice with it. You're going to need Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/), or if you don't want to you can find your own way of changing a bunch of "XXX"s to "eng". Also, the iPod can display lyrics that aren't in English, it probably just needs a valid language code. It will probably work if you change the language to, say, "jap", you're free to try doing that if you want.

In Mp3tag, load the directory of all your music. Two of the toolbar icons should have An uppercase A and a lowercase a. Click the one without an arrow, and a window about "Action Groups" should pop up. Click the button to make a new action group, name it whatever you want, and then click the "new" button again to add an action to the action group.

You'll want "replace" as the action type, so select that. Now, in the "Field" text entry, put "UNSYNCEDLYRICS", in "Original", put "XXX", and in "Replace with" put eng. I'm assuming you can put in any valid language code, as long as it exists, but unless you have crazy unicode and Asian characters, it shouldn't really matter what you put.

Run this action on whatever files you have, and then re-transfer the song to your iPod, hopefully it will show up.

Is it possible that your Samsung player uses its own proprietary methods for lyrics, or doesn't actually support unsynced lyrics, and only supports synced lyrics? Judging from videos like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91jnJU... and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4TwOV... it looks like it supports synced, karaoke style lyrics, which might mean that it doesn't support unsynced lyrics. In that case, Samsung probably has their own software for adding synced lyrics, which is a pain. I don't think synced lyrics is an ID3 standard, which would mean that there's nothing wrong with your ID3 tags.

Sorry the changing "XXX" to "eng" didn't work for you, it worked for my iPod. – raycosm, on August 05, 2009 17:08

It's definitely #2 from Mike M's answer, I have an iPod touch and I use the ml_ipod plugin for Winamp to manage it. All lyrics written by LyricMaster don't show up at all on my iPod, but Mp3tag shows that the lyrics are written to the USLT frame. If I remove the XXX/change it to eng on a song, then re-transfer the song, then lyrics show up on my iPod. It might be a thing where ml_ipod doesn't update the database on my iPod, or it can be that the iPod doesn't display lyrics if the language code is invalid.

I don't know about the Samsung player, but it's pretty clear to me that either ml_ipod or the iPod itself wants a valid language code, or it won't show lyrics. Removing the XXX in Mp3tag causes it to write eng for the language code by default, but there's no easy way to do that for an entire music library, and I'm no good at writing a script to do that.

I'd really like it if LyricMaster just wrote a valid language code so that mp3 players can display it, out of all the lyrics fetching plugins or programs I've used, LyricMaster has been the best. I know there's a ton of music that's not in the English language, but if the USLT was meant to be language neutral anyway, why not write "eng" instead of "XXX"?

EDIT: Okay, it's really easy to do this in Mp3tag actually. Two of the toolbar icons should have An uppercase A and a lowercase a. Click the one without an arrow, and a window about "Action Groups" should pop up. Click the button to make a new action group, name it whatever you want, and then click the "new" button again to add an action to the action group.

You'll want "replace" as the action type, so select that. Now, in the "Field" text entry, put "UNSYNCEDLYRICS", in "Original", put "XXX", and in "Replace with" put eng. I'm assuming you can put in any valid language code, as long as it exists, but unless you have crazy unicode and Asian characters, it shouldn't really matter what you put.

Run this action on whatever files you have, and then re-transfer the song to your mp3 player, hopefully it will show up.

First let's clear up the confusion. The program you referenced initially, mp3tag is completely different from the program atrieu referenced, Mp3tag. I only know about the second one, so I will give instructions on using Mp3tag.

Second, "UNSYNCEDLYRICS" in Mp3tag is mapped to the "USLT" ID3v2 frame which is the correct and commonly-supported frame to use for lyrics that do not include timing information. It is used by LyricMaster, Windows Media Player, and iTunes. There is no "LYRICS" frame in ID3v2 or in Mp3tag.

If your device supports unsynced lyrics, then I can think of three reasons why it might not display lyrics in the USLT frame:

1) The device doesn't fully support ID3v2.4, which is the only tag format Songbird can write. This is the reason that WMP doesn't display lyrics from Songbird. In Mp3tag, you can set the output format to ID3v2.3 by going to Tools->Options, then Tags->MPEG. Make sure ID3v2 is checked and select ID3v2.3 UTF-16 underneath it. Resave the files with this option selected to write ID3v2.3 tags instead of ID3v2.4 tags. You can see what tag version is in the file under the "Tag" column in Mp3tag. I would try this first on just a few files and see if they work.

2) Lyrics tag has an invalid language code. Lyricmaster writes the language code "XXX" into the USLT frame. This is clearly intended to be language neutral but is in fact not a valid language code. In Mp3tag, you can set the language code by placing it at the beginning of the text in the UNSYNCEDLYRICS frame, followed by two bars. For example, if the songs lyrics are "I'm going to eat a cake...", then in the UNSYNCEDLYRICS text box you could type "eng||I'm going to eat a cake..." to explicitly set english as the language for the lyrics. Alternatively, if you just remove the "XXX||" from the beginning of the text, Mp3tag will automatically add the code for english when you save the tags. Don't bother trying this unless the changing to ID3v2.3 didn't work. This is unlikely to be the problem but it could be.

3) The device uses a proprietary/non-standard solution for displaying lyrics. There's not much you can do in this case except use the official software to put lyrics on the device or reverse engineer the exact method that is used.

Note that synchronized lyrics (that contain timing information) are a completely different story, but I don't believe that Lyricmaster supports them anyway. Anyway, good luck!