To start with, I dumped Windows Media Player a while ago in favor of WinAmp. If you haven’t, you should. If you have, bravo! WinAmp is much better and customization is more robust. It is free, but the pay version is recommended. It does have one drawback; I was never able to get the album art view to work as I like. I was willing to live with that limitation. Until I found…
Minilyrics! This is a great utility that works with many different media players. You can choose a theme that matches your choice. Since I use WinAmp, the Minilyrics window looks just like WinAmp. When you play a song with Minilyrics active, it searches it’s own website for a match to your song and downloads the most highly rated lyrics that match. You can keep the default or search for and download others. There is also a built-in lyric editor that allows you to change the downloaded ones or create your own.
At first I just used a bar across the top. It worked but something was missing. My album art! When I rip an MP3, I go to Album Art Exchange to see if someone has uploaded an 800×800 version of the album art. I search Wikipedia to find the original album for the song. I own greatest hits collections but I when I edit the details of the MP3, I always try to enter the correct information on the original album. I then use Mp3tag to embed the artwork. Mp3tag also allows for the editing of all tags so you can set the year, track number, comments, etc., for any of your songs. You can also use iTunes to embed artwork but some versions of iTunes don’t set the ID3 tags properly. You may not want to use iTunes.
Back in Minilyrics, I’ve set the screen so it shows the album art as the window background and I have the lyrics show over the album art as the song plays. Very nice! A new addition to MiniLyrics is that when you use the album art as a background, the window will scale the artwork automatically.
I’ve never found a tutorial for Minilyrics, maybe I’ll create one for YouTube one day. It’s pretty easy and once you get the hang of it, you’ll see. If you want my lyric files, look for the ones created by TooMuchTime.
Stranded in Sonoma 