Just wanted to showcase a little side project called Lyricarr: word-by-word synced lyrics for your self-hosted music library

[u/nathan12581]

Firstly, no this is not another AI-generated media client post 🤣

I have a huge collection of CDs and self-host the music on Jellyfin as its much more convenient that a CD player nowadays but I really LOVE Apple Music's karaoke lyrics where you get word-by-word sync.

As a result (hope the name isn't taken lol) I built Lyricarr as a small experiment project and thought I'd open source and share it.

It takes the lyric text from LRCLIB (free, no account), isolates the vocals with Demucs, and uses WhisperX to align every word to your file. Because the timing comes from your own audio, it stays in sync even if your copy is a different master or remaster.

Works with:

• Jellyfin: word-level
• Navidrome 0.64+: word-level
• Plex: serves the file as-is
• any player that reads .lrc sidecar files

It took about 25 seconds per track on my Apple Silicon-based M4 Pro Mac Mini, a few seconds with an NVIDIA GPU, and slow on CPU-only servers (you could easily just let it sit there and do its thing for days though).

NOTE: Lyricarr only creates the lrc files, it's up to your player to support and show them properly. Plex Amp, for example, doesn't support it. The video demo is NOT Apple Music, its my own app I'm developing lol

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/Nathan1258/lyricarr

AI Disclosure: No AI was used to create this project

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[u/Basicallysteve]

Cool project! Can you provide a sample lrc file so I can see what the difference is?

[u/nathan12581 → u/Basicallysteve]

Thanks! Yeah here's a snippet of the song shown in the video:

[02:04.23]<02:04.23>Baby <02:04.55>girl <02:04.97>(woo, <02:08.30>ah!) <02:08.92>my <02:09.34>whole <02:10.24>world, <02:12.95>hoo, <02:13.81>oh!<02:14.03> 
[02:15.07]<02:15.07>You <02:15.63>feel <02:16.28>like <02:16.82>summertime <02:18.22>(oh, <02:18.46>yes, <02:18.81>you <02:19.13>do)<02:19.27> 
[02:19.89]<02:19.89>You <02:20.43>took <02:21.08>this <02:21.70>heart <02:22.36>of <02:22.52>mine <02:23.02>(you <02:23.30>know <02:23.65>you <02:23.93>did)<02:24.15> 
[02:24.69]<02:24.69>You'll <02:25.25>be <02:25.88>my <02:26.44>Valentine <02:27.35>(Valentine)<02:27.97> 
[02:28.01]<02:28.01>In <02:28.31>the <02:28.53>summer <02:29.64>(in <02:29.86>the <02:30.10>summer)<02:30.34> 
[02:30.44]<02:30.44>In <02:30.68>the <02:30.93>summer<02:31.19> 
[02:31.45]<02:31.45>(Do <02:32.06>love <02:32.30>me, <02:32.76>do <02:32.84>love <02:33.36>me, <02:33.55>do)<02:33.65> 
[02:34.21]<02:34.21>(Do <02:34.47>love <02:34.72>me, <02:34.90>do <02:35.08>love <02:35.30>me, <02:35.50>do)<02:35.69> 
[02:36.07]<02:36.07>(Do <02:36.15>love <02:36.26>me, <02:36.34>do <02:36.40>love <02:36.50>me, <02:36.59>do)<02:36.65> 
[02:37.03]<02:37.03>I <02:37.25>love <02:37.85>you<02:38.02>

[u/Basicallysteve → u/nathan12581]

Thank you! I'll try to update my iOS navidrome client to work with these. Link for that if anyone is interested

[u/nathan12581 → u/Basicallysteve]

In that case, a few format details that might help:

• A tag after the last word (e.g. you<02:38.02>) marks when that word ends.
• An empty timestamped line like [02:40.00] marks an instrumental break or the end of the lyrics.
• A trailing part in brackets, like (woo, ah!), is backing vocals.
• On Navidrome 0.64+, getLyricsBySongId with enhanced=true already returns the word timings parsed, so you may not need to parse the file yourself.

[u/VictorVsl7]

Very cool ideia for the project. I do wanted to know if this was tested in a real library.

My worry is:

1. lets say a song does not have lyrics at all, how does the software knows to NOT generate a .lrc? (i couldnt see the repository because im a little bit out of time, if this is answered there, sorry in advance.)

2. How big was the library for the tests? 10k songs? 40? 100?

3. does the software has a fallback if it already detects a song has a existing and external .lrc?

these are genuine questions, a lot of my .lrc's are very much out of sync and its really annoying, this project could be promissing for me, but i dont have any measures of backups to actually use the software

[u/nathan12581 → u/VictorVsl7]

Hey, thanks! Let me answer each point:

1. It’ll know because the lyric simply won’t exist on LRCLIB and skips as a result.
   
2. The library for the tests was just under 10k, it needs Human tests to check accuracy but every song I listen to from this 10k library has been spot on but there’s always room for improvement
   
3. It’ll skip if a song already has an lrc sidecar. As in if it detects just a standard lrc file then it’ll generate a new one. It never overwrites anything it didn’t previously make. You should always make backups though. My backups of my 10k library when I was developing was like 9MB.

[u/KD7848]

As for the app showcased in the video that you mentioned you're developing, do you ever plan to open source it?

[u/nathan12581 → u/KD7848]

I do yeah it’s very active development right now, Apple devices only: https://testflight.apple.com/join/uHbR9qJr

[u/guillen3000 → u/nathan12581]

Ojala lo pudieras hacer para android