Word-synced desktop lyrics for Apple Music, Spotify, QQ Music, NetEase, Kugou, and for YouTube Music or Spotify Web in a browser. Nine lyric providers are queried at once and every candidate is scored on one scale — title, artist, album, duration fit, word-level timing — so live takes, Cantonese versions and radio edits get the words that actually match. Shows up as a floating overlay, a Dynamic Island capsule, an Apple-Music-style window, or in the menu bar. Free and open source, no account.
Maker here. I built this because the lyrics app most of us used on macOS (LyricsX) hasn't shipped a release since April 2022 — but the real reason was a different annoyance: lyrics that don't match the version of the track playing. The live recording gets studio lyrics, the Cantonese version gets Mandarin lyrics, a radio edit gets the album cut's timeline.
Most lyrics apps ask a few providers in order and take the first usable answer. Lyrimuse instead queries nine of them concurrently and scores every candidate on one scale — title/artist/album fit, how well the reported duration matches the actual track, whether there's word-level timing, whether the text is corroborated by other providers. Version qualifiers like Live / Remix / (Edit) / (Cantonese) are judged separately, so a mismatch there is heavily penalised. Each track keeps a panel showing what every candidate scored and why the winner won, and anything you pick by hand is locked from later re-matching.
It shows lyrics in four places, in any combination: a desktop overlay, a Dynamic Island capsule, an Apple-Music-style lyrics window, or the menu bar itself (with an optional second row for the next line, the translation, or romanization). Apple Music, Spotify, QQ Music, NetEase and Kugou all work, as do YouTube Music and Spotify Web in a browser. Translation comes from the provider's own community translation when there is one, otherwise Apple's on-device Translation framework; Cantonese songs get word-aware Jyutping, Japanese gets furigana.
Free, GPL-3.0, no account, no telemetry. Happy to answer anything.
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Live versions getting the wrong lyrics is so annoying. Happens way too often.
That's the case it exists for — live takes usually run longer than the album cut, so the duration gap gets scored instead of just taking whichever source answers first. Throw a live album at it if you get the chance, and if you hit a track it still gets wrong, tell me which one — here or on GitHub. Mismatches are what I tune the scoring on.
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The word by word sync sounds really nice. Makes following the lyrics much easier.
Thanks. I always end up following along and singing with it, so the karaoke style fill was the part I cared about most. Without it a lyrics app is basically a text file that scrolls.
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The Jyutping support is cool. Wasn't expecting that.
Lyrimuse
Live versions getting the wrong lyrics is so annoying. Happens way too often.
Lyrimuse
That's the case it exists for — live takes usually run longer than the album cut, so the duration gap gets scored instead of just taking whichever source answers first. Throw a live album at it if you get the chance, and if you hit a track it still gets wrong, tell me which one — here or on GitHub. Mismatches are what I tune the scoring on.
The word by word sync sounds really nice. Makes following the lyrics much easier.
Lyrimuse
Thanks. I always end up following along and singing with it, so the karaoke style fill was the part I cared about most. Without it a lyrics app is basically a text file that scrolls.
The Jyutping support is cool. Wasn't expecting that.
Lyrimuse
Honestly that's what got me started on this. I listen to a lot of Cantonese music and none of the open source lyrics apps I tried did Jyutping at all.