10.5: Find iTunes song lyrics using Spotlight

Search

From our Sponsor...

User Functions

Don't have an account yet? Sign up as a New User
Lost your password?

What's New:

Hints

No new hints

Comments last 2 days

Links last 2 weeks

No recent new links

What's New in the Forums?

The Editor's Corner...

Here are some of my (robg) other projects...

•	The Robservatory My blog - Macs, tech, etc.
•	Mac OS X Power Hound The best of Hints in print
•	Inside iWork An iWork training DVD
•	Macworld Column, features, online...

Hints by Topic

News from Macworld

The macosxhints Poll

What version of OS X are you running as your main OS?

Other polls | 11,376 votes | 42 comments

10.5: Find iTunes song lyrics using Spotlight | 3 comments | Create New Account

Click here to return to the '10.5: Find iTunes song lyrics using Spotlight' hint

The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.

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 :-(

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.