Review: Lyrica 2 for Mac

I—like many of you—live in iTunes. At home, I have a set of 1TB hard drives setup in a RAID-1 configuration just for my iTunes library. Currently, my library weighs in at 516 GB. A solid chunk of that is music.

Before carrying an iOS device, I didn’t care much about song lyric data. If I wanted to look up the words to a track, I’d simply fire up the old standby that is Google. However, with its gorgeous iPod app, iOS makes it a lot easier to see lryics. I’ve found myself frustrated that most of my media doesn’t include that data.

Well, until earlier this week, that is.

Because earlier this week, I discovered Lyrica 2 by MuffinStory. Here is how the developer describes the app’s functions:

  • It shows and adds the lyrics of the currently playing song
  • It adds all lyrics to songs from a selected iTunes playlist
  • It lets you search for lyrics you can only remember a small text passage

Additional features like printing are coming in version 2.1.

The first function is simple and fast. Open the app, hit the button and boom, lyrics. Words are automatically added to the track’s metadata, making them available to Apple’s line of music players.

Here’s what the app looks like in action:

As you an see in the above screenshot, Lyrica 2’s UI is very simple and straightforward. Lyrics appear, centered on the screen, set in Palatino (a personal favorite) with no frills. I love this kind of minimal design when it comes to apps. Sadly, the 3D page treatment to the right side is a little weird, but I can live with it.

In addition to just finding lyrics to the currently-playing track, Lyrica 2 can scan an entire playlist — or even iTunes library. On my 65 GB of music, the app took about an hour or so to do its thing. Not bad. Never did the app freeze or spike its CPU or RAM usage, and the UI gains a status bar across the bottom, with a counter showing the app’s progress:

In short, Lyrica 2 is a well-behaved, well-written, helpful and handsome Mac app. And you should go download it.

Stephen Hackett, formerly a Lead Mac Genius at Apple, now spends his days running the IT department of a large non-profit in Memphis, TN. He writes about Apple, design and journalism at forkbombr.net. Like all twenty-somethings, you can find him on Twitter. Oh, and he has a dogcow tattoo.