Lyrics

Listen shows the lyrics of the playing song, highlights the line being sung and, when the lyrics carry word timings, the word. It can search other providers by hand, translate lines, show Japanese readings and export lyrics to a file.

Where to see lyrics

• The Lyrics button in the player bar opens the full-screen player on its Lyrics tab.
• A lyrics panel in the right sidebar: switch on Lyrics panel in Settings → Playback → Player sidebar panels. It can sit under the queue, or share one panel with the visualizer (Combine lyrics and visualizer).

Lyrics that follow the song (“synchronized”) scroll along and light up the current line. Plain lyrics without timing are shown as static text. If no lyrics are found, the view says “No lyrics found for this song.”

Where lyrics come from

When a song starts, Listen looks for lyrics in this order:

1. A lyrics version you picked by hand for this song earlier (see Search).
2. The song’s own server: Navidrome and other OpenSubsonic servers, and YouTube Music, can provide lyrics themselves.
3. The online providers you enabled.

With Prefer local lyrics on (the default), the server’s or YouTube Music’s synchronized lyrics are used without asking any provider. Plain server lyrics give way to synchronized lyrics from a provider. With it off, a provider result wins whenever one is found.

The providers are asked one after the other in your order. The first that has synchronized lyrics for the song wins. If none has, the best plain-text match of the earliest provider is used. A result is only trusted if title and artist are close enough to the playing song.

Each lookup sends the song’s title, artist, album and length to the providers you enabled. Nothing is sent when Fetch lyrics is off. While DJ transitions mix songs, the next song’s lyrics are looked up ahead too, to find where its singing starts.

To change this, open Settings → Playback → Lyrics:

• Fetch lyrics turns the lookup on or off. It covers the server’s lyrics as well as the providers. With it off, Listen finds no lyrics, apart from versions you picked by hand.
• Lyric providers lists the four providers. Use the switch to enable one and the arrows to change the order.
• Prefer local lyrics, as described above.

The Show the provider and Show the match switches in the display settings add a line naming where the lyrics came from (and which song the provider matched).

Using the lyrics view

Under the lyrics are two rows of buttons:

Offset

The number between − and + is the shift in milliseconds for this song. The default for all songs is Lyric offset in Settings → Playback → Lyrics (-2000 to 2000 ms, default 0). A per-song change lasts for the current session.

Searching for other lyrics

If the automatic lookup picked the wrong song or no lyrics:

1. Press SEARCH. The title and artist of the playing song are filled in.
2. Change them if needed and press Enter or Search. Every enabled provider is asked at once.
3. Select a result to preview it. Results are sorted with synchronized ones first, and marked synchronized or unsynchronized.
4. Press Apply to use it. Listen remembers your choice for this song, also after a restart.

Export in this dialog saves the previewed result.

Display settings

DISPLAY (and the same rows at the end of Settings → Playback → Lyrics) sets:

Line lead time makes a line light up that many milliseconds before its time stamp, so you can read ahead. Lines in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew are aligned to the right.

Karaoke highlighting

When lyrics have word timings (enhanced LRC files, or NetEase’s word-by-word format), the words of the current line light up as they are sung. There is no setting for this; it happens whenever the lyrics contain word timings and are synchronized.

Japanese: romaji and furigana

Two optional extras help with Japanese lyrics:

• Romaji shows the line in Latin letters under it. Kana are converted directly; kanji are read through the built-in dictionary when your build has one.
• Furigana shows the reading of the kanji above them. It needs the Japanese dictionary that normal builds include. If your build lacks it, the setting says so and stays off.

Both are off by default. Chinese text without kana is left alone.

Translation

There are three kinds of translation:

1. NetEase translations. Switch on NetEase translations to fetch NetEase’s own translation along with the lyrics and show it under each line.

2. Online translation with your own key. Listen can send the lyrics to Microsoft Azure Translator or Google Cloud Translation. Set it up in Settings → Playback → Lyrics:

   1. Pick Translation provider: Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
   2. Paste your API key into Translation API key. You need your own account with that provider; Listen has no key of its own.
   3. Choose Translation language (31 languages, English by default).
   4. Press TRANSLATION in the lyrics view to translate the playing song. Turn on Automatic translation to translate every song’s lyrics as they load.

3. Gemini (the AI DJ’s key). Pick Gemini as Translation provider. It needs no key of its own: it uses the Gemini key you set up for the AI DJ and its text model. Only lines with non-Latin letters are sent, numbered, so the translation always lands under the right line and whole English lines (common in K-pop) stay as they are, with no translation under them. English words inside a Korean line are kept. There is no romanisation. Each song’s translation is cached per language, so opening the song again needs no request; new lyrics for the song (another version) are translated afresh.

The whole text of the lyrics goes to the provider you chose in one request, with your key, and nothing else. The key is stored in Listen’s configuration file, so treat that file as private (see Privacy and security). The provider may charge for usage under your account.

Word meanings (Korean)

When the lyrics contain Korean and the AI DJ has a Gemini key, the lyrics controls show WORDS. Press it and every Korean word becomes clickable; click one to see its dictionary form (골랐다는 → 고르다), part of speech and a short meaning that fits the song, in the app language (German or English). All words of a song are looked up in one Gemini request the first time and cached, so later clicks open at once. Press WORDS again to make the lines clickable for seeking again.

Lute. Enter your vocab-hub address under Settings → Playback → Lyrics → vocab-hub address (empty = off). The word dialog then shows whether Lute knows the word (known, learning with its level, ignored, or not in Lute yet). Listen only reads your Lute words and never adds or changes a term; add new words in Lute itself.

Known words. With the vocab-hub set, WORDS also colours the Korean words by their Lute status: new words in green, words you are learning in light green, known and ignored words in the normal text colour. Next to WORDS the controls show how many of the song’s sung words you know (95 % known; every time a word is sung counts, ignored words are left out). Listen looks a word up as written, by its dictionary form and with particles cut off (사람들은 → 사람); words that are still unknown then are asked from the hub one by one, which finds conjugated forms the way Lute does (보낼게요 → 보내다). The percentage is the hub’s own count of the song (the same number the Lute Coverage extension shows). Lute changes show up within five minutes.

Exporting lyrics

EXPORT opens a preview of the file Listen would write. For synchronized lyrics you can keep Synchronized (.lrc) on (with an Offset (ms) written into the file) or switch it off to get plain text. The file is saved to your Downloads folder as Artist - Title.lrc or .txt, and the dialog shows the exact name. Word timings and translations are kept in the .lrc file.