Finding Missing Lyrics in your MP3 songs

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.
Adding a column to find missing lyrics in MP3tag

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.
Simple method of missing lyrics

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:
More complex method of missing lyrics

(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.
🙂 🙂 🙂

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