Lyrics Muse – Mash up your last.fm profile with lyrics

The End of Lyrics Muse?

Big developments in the lyrics community. Due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers LyricWiki can no longer provide lyrics through their API. As you might know Lyrics Muse gets its lyrics via the API from LyricWiki (for the non-techies an API is simply a interface to communicate with).

This leaves Lyrics Muse and all the other mashups more or less dead in the water. You can read Sean’s (the founder of LyricWiki) post on the matter here.

Right now I’m going to sit back and ponder the future of Lyrics Muse. Without the awesome API (and thanks Sean and LyriWiki contributors for that) there isn’t much point in Lyrics Muse and there never would have been a Lyrics Muse. Also I don’t have the financial resources by a long shot to license the lyrics although I would love to. I might have been able to pay a small fee to use the LyricWiki API but as Sean writes:

I don’t anticipate that the major publishers will ever change their mind to allow us to provide lyrics through our API (even for a fee)

Given that I’m not even covering expenses to host Lyrics Muse not to mention the time spent developing the site I’m not really sure where this will go. Suggestions welcome.

Spotify, last.fm and Lyrics Muse

I’ve recently started to use the most excellent Spotify. Infact I’m using Spotify more than the trusty old iTunes so naturally I still want my lyrics readily available. Turns out that’s super easy to set up.

In Spotify you simply enter your last.fm username and password in it’s Preferences window and you’re on your way. Couldn’t be simpler.

Your Current Lyrics

A minor update happened last night. ShoWr came up with an idea of having a “direct link” to the current lyrics and it of course makes perfect sense. So now you can navigate to this page and it will always show the latest song lyrics.

The page doesn’t automatically refresh so you have to do that manually.

Recent Tracks Now Spiffier + House Cleaning

last.fm recently launched version 2.0 of their API which amongst other things gives us developers the possibility to see on the second which tracks a user is listening to. So obviously this has been integrated into Lyrics Muse and you should now experience that your recent tracks list in the sidebar is much more in tune (no pun intended) with last.fm. With version 1.0 there was always tens of seconds of “lag”. This is now almost gone.

House Cleaning

I’ve begung purging very old tracks/albums/artists which offers no lyrics so if you experience your library of songs diminish this is the reason. This will also help removing lots of badly tagged data not to mention making the rest of Lyrics Muse faster. Over the last day around 20% artists have been purged along with 35% tracks.

Favourite Your Albums and Artists

For a long time you’ve been able to favourite your tracks so you could have quicker and easier access to them. Now the same feature has been added to albums and artists. Simply click on the <3 icon on an album or artist page to favourite an item.

It’s now also possible to quickly remove favourited items on your personal dashboard page. Just click ‘remove’ next to the artist, album or track.

Your Artists, Albums and Songs

Lyrics Muse now presents a user who’s logged in with only his or her items where possible. For instance if you browse to “My Albums” and select an album or an artist from there you will only see the tracks that you have listened to for that album. You can toggle this easily on the page itself if you want to browse all tracks for the album. This feature should make it easier to browse your personal library.

Search is Back Up!

What the subject says.

Now with delta indexing in place strain on the server has been reduced significantly.

Search is Down – Amazon Store

Search is currently disabled. I hope to have it back running today but I’m not sure.

TECHNICAL NERD STUFF AHEAD:

Search is based on Sphinx which is a very fine search engine indeed. It indexes fast but when the amount of data becomes too large you need to use something called delta indexing, which as the name implies only indexes the “what changed since the last full index” and then merges it with the full index.

I was trying to implement that yesterday and it seemed to work, so I rolled out a new version of Lyrics Muse. Then it started going sour on me and I had to disable it.

Amazon Store

If you feel inclined to support Lyrics Muse and regularly shop at Amazon I’ve added a small storefront you can shop through. This will support Lyrics Muse with a few affiliate dollars.

Automatic Refresh Feature

Something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time turned out to be a fairly quick and painless feature enhancement. I simply love Ruby on Rails and the easy integration with Prototype. AJAX becomes a breeze.

The feature in question is automatic updating of your recent tracks and artists shown in the sidebar. Earlier you would have to manually reload the page but now it automagically updates every minute. That is, it checks the server to see if your listening data has been updated from last.fm and if so updates your sidebar.

The feature is hardly noticable but I’m already noticing that I’m manually refreshing a whole lot less.

Missing Lyrics

I just got back from a pretty cool Roskilde Festival. Not the best program but nonetheless filled with lots of good concerts if you were willing to research the line-up a little.

As you know Lyrics Muse is all about quickly finding the lyrics for the songs you’re listening to right now. As such it is super annoying to click on a song only to be directed to the edit window.

For that reason you can now see if a song has lyrics or not. In most places with a link to a song “(ML)” is appended to the song title if it is Missing Lyrics.

For those of you who contribute (thanks, you guys rock!) you can still see the most popular tracks with no lyrics here but now you can simply go to Coldplay’s artist overview page and see which songs need some lyrics lovin’.