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.

Tags: lyricsmuse, lyricwiki

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.

Tags: features, lyricsmuse, performance

Lyrics Muse Blog – Welcome

Welcome to the Lyrics Muse blog.

I used to write about changes and tidbits in the last.fm group but in the long run this simply isn’t working out for me or the users who want to know what’s going on. This blog will serve as a better outlet for the changes and upcoming features on Lyrics Muse.

Tags: lyricsmuse