Automatically view song lyrics as you listen

Tutorial – Lyrics-in-terminal

Article from Issue 246/2021
Author(s):

Whether you listen to music on Spotify or a classic audio player like Rhythmbox, Lollypop, or Audacious, a tool named Lyrics-in-terminal will let you read the lyrics for the track you are currently playing.

In today's very challenging times, there are many artists who write expressive, interesting, and relevant lyrics. Whether it's hip-hop, pop, or folk music, you'll find many artists in recent years who definitely have something to say.

However, it is often not easy for the listener to hear exactly what an artist is saying or singing, or to follow along quickly enough – consider for example, Eminem's double-time rap. Regardless of your taste in music, for many songs you might wish you had a simple option for displaying the lyrics, so you can follow along without having to search for the lyrics on the web time and time again. Some players do offer the ability to display the lyrics for the track currently playing, but even better, the Lyrics-in-terminal [1] program can retrofit this feature for virtually any player.

Installation

Currently you will not find the program in the package sources of the common distributions. Users of Arch Linux and its derivatives have the easiest approach to installing the application: Just download the package lyrics-in-terminal from the Arch User Repository (AUR) onto your system. If you are working with a different distribution, use the pip Python package manager instead, and then run the commands from Listing 1 to install the program on Debian or Ubuntu.

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