I love singing when I’m a passenger or driver in the car. On the nearly 3 hour car ride through the Pocono Mountains to my in-laws, I have to have something to entertain me through the ride as my husband takes the wheel and I keep him awake by screaming on top of my lungs. (Hey, at least he tolerates it.) I’ll be perfectly honest: the iPod touch, to me, is a music device before it is a device that plays games and takes notes. Therefore, having great music is incredibly important, and having music I can sing along to is priceless.
But I don’t really want to sound ridiculous when I’m singing. And hey, do you? Don’t you want to know what you’re singing so you don’t fudge those words? Lyrical Premium (iTunes link, $0.99) is able to do make it easier for you to look like a brilliant singer who has a terrific memory. Using your iPhone’s connection or wifi, Lyrical pulls song lyrics from LyricWiki.org and displays them on your screen:
There have been times when I’ve caught myself in a song not knowing what to sing next. I’ve been using my Treo instead, and with Google’s help, finding those words. Lyrical is a GREAT alternative. Fortunately, there’s also a free version in case you want to see how incredibly powerful the app is before you take the plunge and buy it.
While incredibly powerful as a lyrics engine, there’s room for improvement. As an example, Lyrical has offline browsing for songs you have played, which is especially helpful for those of us who have iPod touches and don’t have unlimited wifi. I especially will appreciate that when I’m stuck smack in the middle of the Delaware Water Gap on that long car ride! But it would be incredibly awesome for Lyrical to traverse through your entire music library and grab all the song lyrics when you are online (by request, I suppose), instead of having to manually play each song to grab the lyrics. To that end, I’d be curious to know what would happen if the ID3 tags were modified after the lyrics were pulled. Are the lyrics tied to an ID3 tag or are they stored separately?
Further, it would also be great to make Lyrical a standalone MP3 player that operates like the iPhone/iPod touch music app. In a way, this already is possible — you can play a song from Lyrical and it will pull the lyrics for you. However, when the song stops playing, it’s over. I happen to prefer shuffling my music and listening to more, and if I’m in Lyrical and start the music, I don’t want it to end after the song is done. It seems that the only way I can get my music continuously is to start the Music app on the iPod first, which is not incredibly intuitive. Still, though, that’s the way to get the music playing forever — and I’m currently leaving it running to get as many lyrics to as many songs as possible. With the number of songs in my library, this will take about a week.
I love Lyrical and hope that there’s more to come from here. If music is your thing, and singing empowers you, get Lyrical. You won’t be disappointed.
Giveaway: See the screenshots above? That’s the kind of music I fancy. I’ll be giving away a code to Lyrical Premium to one lucky person who can guess a song I have on my iPod. Will it be you? Comment away! I have one code, so if more than one person guesses a correct song, I will randomly choose the winner.
