Lyrics Plugin

The lyrics plugin fetches and stores song lyrics from databases on the Web. Namely, the current version of the plugin uses Lyric Wiki, Lyrics.com, Musixmatch, and, optionally, the Google custom search API.

Fetch Lyrics During Import

To automatically fetch lyrics for songs you import, enable the lyrics plugin in your configuration (see Using Plugins). Then, install the requests library by typing:

pip install requests

The plugin uses requests to download lyrics.

When importing new files, beets will now fetch lyrics for files that don’t already have them. The lyrics will be stored in the beets database. If the import.write config option is on, then the lyrics will also be written to the files’ tags.

Configuration

To configure the plugin, make a lyrics: section in your configuration file. The available options are:

  • auto: Fetch lyrics automatically during import. Default: yes.
  • fallback: By default, the file will be left unchanged when no lyrics are found. Use the empty string '' to reset the lyrics in such a case. Default: None.
  • force: By default, beets won’t fetch lyrics if the files already have ones. To instead always fetch lyrics, set the force option to yes. Default: no.
  • google_API_key: Your Google API key (to enable the Google Custom Search backend). Default: None.
  • google_engine_ID: The custom search engine to use. Default: The beets custom search engine, which gathers an updated list of sources known to be scrapeable.
  • sources: List of sources to search for lyrics. An asterisk * expands to all available sources. Default: google lyricwiki lyrics.com musixmatch, i.e., all sources. google source will be automatically deactivated if no google_engine_ID is setup.

Here’s an example of config.yaml:

lyrics:
  fallback: ''
  google_API_key: AZERTYUIOPQSDFGHJKLMWXCVBN1234567890_ab
  google_engine_ID: 009217259823014548361:lndtuqkycfu

Fetching Lyrics Manually

The lyrics command provided by this plugin fetches lyrics for items that match a query (see Queries). For example, beet lyrics magnetic fields absolutely cuckoo will get the lyrics for the appropriate Magnetic Fields song, beet lyrics magnetic fields will get lyrics for all my tracks by that band, and beet lyrics will get lyrics for my entire library. The lyrics will be added to the beets database and, if import.write is on, embedded into files’ metadata.

The -p option to the lyrics command makes it print lyrics out to the console so you can view the fetched (or previously-stored) lyrics.

The -f option forces the command to fetch lyrics, even for tracks that already have lyrics.