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10.5: Find iTunes song lyrics using Spotlight System 10.5
I'm a huge fan of the lyrics capabilities of iTunes, but I was a little dismayed by the fact that Spotlight didn't include song lyrics in its indexing ... until Leopard, apparently!

I didn't try this on purpose, but I typed tech into the Spotlight search field, and together with the folder I was looking for, the search results also listed the MP3 file of U2's Zooropa -- the first track of the album with the same name. How could that be? I immediatly recalled the bit of the lyrics that goes 'Zooropa, vorsprung durch Technik.' So I typed in some additional lyrics into the Spotlight field. To my great delight, it's now possible to search into your iTunes lyrics library from Spotlight, provided that you have previously filled up your MP3s with the lyrics.
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10.5: Find iTunes song lyrics using Spotlight | 3 comments | Create New Account
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10.5: Find iTunes song lyrics using Spotlight
Authored by: Hauberg on Tue, Feb 26 2008 at 9:10AM PST
Strangely this seems to be just MP3's and not AAC audio :-(

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10.5: Find iTunes song lyrics using Spotlight
Authored by: nicola_s on Sat, Mar 1 2008 at 8:56AM PST
I started to poke around with mdls a little to see if it's possilbe to force the ©lyr atom to be indexed by spotlight, but strangely mdls used on an mp3 file with lyrics doesn't list any lyrics, even if they are in the file and they are actually indexed because spotlight gives the results. so now I don't have any idea on how apple implemented this.
A little more digging and I discovered that the proper spotlight prefix for lyrics is 'intext', so if you put into spotlight search:
intext:"Pay for the light"
you'll obtain an exact phrase search of your mp3 lyrics. without the intext: prefix the exact phrase search won't work for lyrics.

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10.5: Find iTunes song lyrics using Spotlight
Authored by: ephramz on Tue, Feb 26 2008 at 11:31PM PST
It also doesn't work for MP3's on remote disks that are 10.4, which is pretty common with laptops accessing larger desktop disks, I guess because the 10.4 spotlight is not correctly indexing the lyrics. I guess I can force a reindexing of the remote disk from the 10.5 laptop on the command line to make it work.

Too bad you can't make smart playlists based on lyrics (not listed as a field to search on) so you could have a playlist of songs that mention "love" or "despair"! ;-)

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