The Internet has long been a gold mine of song lyrics – and an article about how to find song lyrics is one of my most popular tutorials! – but it still involved some detective work. If you misheard the lyrics, well, then the search was going to be twice as hard. But now the song lyric database are getting in sync (as it were) with the music players, which is great. The latest to join this trend is Spotify, which now has a screen you can bring up that will display the lyrics to the song you’re hearing, synchronized with where you are in the song.
So fun! And when there’s the waterproof Shower Edition, well, a whole new generation of rock ‘n roll stars will be born and they’ll be clean too. 🙂
The trick is that you have to update your Spotify app and then hunt around a bit since not every song in the Spotify database has associated lyrics yet. Let’s start with that update to Spotify for Mac.
HOW TO UPDATE YOUR SPOTIFY APP
The easiest way to check for an update to your Spotify for Mac app is to choose “About Spotify” from the Spotify menu:
By the way, while you’re looking at this menu notice that there’s an offline mode and that you can enable hardware acceleration too. Give ’em a try!
The About window is surprisingly modest, but it does force a version check:
Notice in the middle it says “A new version of Spotify is available (1.1.72.439). Click here to download”. That’s how ya know, but even here, it doesn’t automatically update. No worries, click on “Click here to download”.
Then it’ll download the new version…
Then, after a relatively short delay for the download to finish up:
Update downloaded to your system! Now you just need to restart, which can be easily done by clicking on “Please restart to install”.
Once you have the latest version, well, you won’t really see any differences. Except…
FINDING THE LYRICS DISPLAY IN SPOTIFY
Not to state the obvious, but the lyrics can only be displayed for songs that have lyrics, and even then, more popular songs are more likely to have lyrics available. To demonstrate, I pulled up Janet Jackson’s song Escapade.
On the Now Playing bar a new icon shows up:
See it? A tiny microphone. Click on it and the main area of the app will be replaced by the lyrics:
It’s great if you want to sing along, no question, but it can also answer your questions about what are those lyrics?
Oh, and if you stay in lyrics view, you’ll undoubtedly occasionally see this:
You can also view lyrics on the Spotify mobile app too. Just look for that same microphone in the Now Playing view!
The post How Can I View Synchronized Song Lyrics in Spotify? originally appeared on Ask Dave Taylor.