I was enjoying a Chinese song on my iPod at Starbucks today and wanted to sing along (silently in case all the customers died of choking).
So I moved to the lyrics screen of that song and to my horror, there was NO LYRICS ! I must have missed it out when I was updating the song in the iTunes.
I rushed home (okay.. I was exaggerating..) and tried to see how I can find out if all my songs in iTunes have lyrics. I played around with the columns in iTunes, tried to create a smart playlist and finally I googled around and found that the only good solution around was the famous DougScript but that’s for the Mac users (oh.. How jealous I am :p)
I was at wit’s end when I suddenly rememberd I am supposed to be using my MP3tag. The best tool around for tagging your MP3 files. I searched around in the MP3tag forums and true enough, a simple solution was found.
In Mp3tag, you can create a column and then add a “script” into the values of the column.
For example, you can count the characters in a lyrics tag field, e.g. using scripting function ‘$len(%UNSYNCEDLYRICS%)’ which will show the number of characters in the lyrics field. So “0” = no lyrics and in the screen shot below, the song that has lyrics has 329 characters.
You can get more fancy about it by using these conditions:
1. $if2($len(%unsyncedlyrics%),)
Result ==> e. g. true: ‘991’, false: [nothing]
2. $iflonger(%unsyncedlyrics%,,’Lyrics exist’,’Lyrics empty’)
Result ==> e. g. true: ‘Lyrics exist’, false: ‘Lyrics empty’
Which looks like this:
(I dun claim credit at all to these.. it is the work of the excellent people at Mp3tag forums !)
Anyway, I scanned my songs in iTunes using MP3tag and the new column. True enough, I found about 8-10 songs not updated. I then went ahead and manually update the songs with the Chinese lyrics and I am happy again.
🙂 🙂 🙂