I’m a huge music enthusiast. An audiophile, even. However, and this is not so uncommon I hear, I much prefer the consistence of a song’s lyrics than its melody. I love knowing what the singer says and feels, and you can only truly understand with a good understanding of how emotions translate into music and words. The music part is mostly instinctive, a bass line triggering a feeling in your guts, a guitar riff flipping your heart around, you can’t really learn that. However, it’s within everyone’s grasp to understand what a song says, and I believe it’s important. That’s why I’m going to give you a tip to get the lyrics from every song you love onto your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s really easy, you don’t have to do much.

First off, I’ll assume you’re using iTunes since you own an iPod or an iPhone. Apple made it so that synchronizing that baby on any other platform is a real bitch, and they’ve greatly succeeded. So open up your iTunes, select a song you like in your library and right-click it to “Get Info”. If you look at the tabs near the top of the popup window, you’ll see a “Lyrics” tab. Clicking on that should simply open the tab with a big empty text area. What we’ll do here is we’ll fill up that box with the song’s lyrics.

Once that’s done and the song is synced on your device, when it plays simply tap the album art (or its placeholder) to get to the shuffle/repeat/position screen. Lyrics should magically appear right below the section you’re used to see.

Now, I hear you saying “Yeah but I’m not gonna do that for every damn song in my library!” and you would be right to say so. There are a number of programs that will automatically fetch song lyrics for you and add them to the song that’s playing in iTunes, so that is what you’ll want to do. Here are a few suggestions:

• TuneLyrics (MacOS)
• iLyrics (Windows)
• iTunes Lyrics Importer (Windows)
• Apple Downloads for iPod + iTunes (MacOS)

So from here on out all you have to do is start the software you chose, play your music in iTunes and watch your software fetch your lyrics! Obviously not every lyric is findable by those applications, but most will offer you a “Google Search” button that should take you right to the lyrics you’re looking for. As a tip, what I do is the following: I have three big playlists that get synced on my iPhone automatically. When I go to bed, I set my laptop’s volume to its lowest, fire up both softwares and let the playlist play! When I get up, I have all my lyrics and sync my iPhone. Ta-daa!