On the Mac, it’s a difficult process getting lyrics to songs and album art automatically. You PC users? Your lucky. Go get iArt, it’ll search through your entire library, either finding the album art or lyrics to each song.

But what about us Mac users eh? Well it used to be easy (or at least easier)…but now it’s just a pain in the —-! Basically, you go download one of three programs, GimmeSomeTune, Skeiron or Tune Lyrics (or Harmonic but that’s a dashboard widget). Now all of these three automatically find and add the lyrics from the internet for the song your currently playing. Now if you want to add the lyrics to your entire library, that’s a bit more time consuming.

For this, you’ll have to play every single song in your library. Now this isn’t too bad if you have a small library… but what if your like me with over 1600 songs? That would take me 277.7 days to get through! That’s almost a year! Most of us naturally don’t want to wait or leave our computers on for that long, so after the break I’ll give you guys the solution… and the problem with that solution

Now the most obvious solution is to only play each song in your library for only several seconds (enough time for the application to find and add the lyrics but not too much as to waste your time). For this were going to need an apple script. This apple script is call Needle Drop.

Shuffle and repeat settings.

Before you do anything else, open up iTunes+your desired application for adding the lyrics/album art and do one of two things. Firstly, of all make or select a pre-made playlist with all the songs you want the lyrics/album art to be added to. Secondly, ensure that your repeat setting is set to playlist once and your shuffle setting is turned off.

Launching the Needle Drop script.

Once you’ve installed Needle Drop go ahead and do what I do in the screen shot; click on the Apple Scripts menu item and then click on Needle Drop. This will bring up a small input dialog box.

Needle Drop dialog box 1.

I recommend about 10 seconds for each track which will easily give the application enough time to find the lyrics or album art. Then click ‘Ok’. The next dialog box you can leave at 0. After you click ‘Ok’ the songs in the playlist you selected will start playing for the amount of time specified.

GimmeSomeTune found lyrics.

I’m using GimmeSomeTune and it works fine for a few songs but unfortunately not for the more popular ones (and ironically not for Michael Jackson’s song ‘They Don’t Care About Us’). Instead, saying…

“Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers we can no longer return lyrics through the LyricWiki API (where this application gets some or all of its lyrics).”

Licensing restrictions on lyrics.

This problem occurs on all the automatic lyric finding applications on the Mac (hence the “Please note: this is not the fault of the developer….” blablabla). I haven’t even been able to find a mention of this problem anywhere on the internet and the only solution I can offer at the moment is to share your music library with a Windows machine and use iArt or just add lyrics manually. I’ll keep you guys updated if any other solutions come about.