Help  /  Troubleshooting

Lyrics will not fetch, or come back unsynced

You pressed Fetch from LRCLIB and got No lyrics found on LRCLIB. Or words arrived, but they sit still instead of scrolling with the song. Most causes live in your tags rather than in the app.

The short answer

1. Check the tags first. The lookup matches on title, artist, album and track length. A blank title or artist means no request is sent.
2. LRCLIB is the only source, and community contributed, so live sets, obscure pressings and classical work are thin.
3. Plain lyrics and timed lyrics are different things. Scrolling needs a timed copy. Ask for one with Get timed lyrics in Library Health.
4. An .lrc file sitting beside your music is never read into your library. Importing from another drive carries the sidecar across, but nothing parses one back into lyrics.
5. A network failure is not a miss. Those tracks are held under Lyrics fetch errors (retry) so one bad moment does not poison every later run.

Why a track finds nothing

A fetch runs in three stages, up to about four requests for one track. First an exact lookup on title and artist, sharpened by the album name and the track length. Then the same lookup with version and credit noise stripped out, so "(Remastered 2011)" and a "feat." credit stop getting in the way. Finally a looser search, ranked to put timed copies first.

That last search is deliberately fussy. A result has to carry a title and artist that plausibly match yours, and a length within twenty seconds of your track. Anything else is discarded rather than attached, because wrong words glued silently to the right song are worse than none. So a wrong length in the library, or a title that is really a filename, puts the correct lyrics out of reach. Fix the tags or run Super-Tag, then fetch again; see Tracks show wrong tags.

An instrumental is a different outcome: LRCLIB reports no words, that answer is recorded as definite, and the track leaves Missing lyrics rather than being re-asked every run.

Words that arrive but will not scroll

Scrolling needs a timed copy, with a timestamp on the line. Two situations produce plain text:

• Lyrics that came out of your own files. A scan reads the lyrics tag along with everything else, and that tag holds plain text. No scan fills the timed column.
• A plain only upload on LRCLIB. The fetch always prefers a timed copy, but it cannot invent one.

The fix for both is Get timed lyrics in Library Health, which re-checks LRCLIB for tracks with plain text but no timing. It writes only the timed copy, never your plain text, and a run that finds nothing changes nothing, so those tracks stay on the list. It also picks up tracks that previously came back empty, worth repeating as uploads keep arriving.

Fetch lyrics is the complement: it acts only on tracks with no words at all, precisely so it can never overwrite any, so a track with plain text is skipped and Get timed lyrics is the button that acts. Fetch lyrics, Get timed lyrics and Retry errored all drive one background job, so while any of them runs the other two are greyed out.

The Tag Editor can say "no lyrics" when it found some

Open a single track in the tag editor and its Lyrics field carries its own Fetch from LRCLIB button, which fills the box only when a plain copy comes back. If LRCLIB holds a timed copy and no plain one, the status reads No lyrics found on LRCLIB while the timed copy has in fact been saved. Close the editor, open the lyrics tab in the Now Playing panel on Home, and it will be waiting.

That field also writes into the file's own tag when you press Save Tags. Fetched lyrics otherwise live in your library, not in your files.

Saving an .lrc

Once a track has lyrics the lyrics pane grows a Save .lrc button in its footer, and Library Health has a batch version under Lyrics → save as .lrc. Both write a small text file named after the track and next to it, the convention other players and car stereos look for, timed where possible and plain otherwise.

The single track button answers three ways. Saved .lrc next to the track is the ordinary case. Kept the existing timed .lrc (not downgrading it) means a timed sidecar was already there and plain text was not allowed to replace it. Nothing to save covers two situations: no lyrics in your library yet, or a sidecar on disk that already matches. The batch reports its own tally instead.

Some tracks are passed over on purpose: an unreadable sidecar is left alone rather than overwritten, anything outside your library folders is skipped, and a track inside a single file album has no file of its own. See Single-file albums and CUE sheets and tags and sidecar files.

Still not right

If lyrics arrive for the wrong song while the tags are correct, describe it under Report a Bug on the Support tab of Settings, with the track's title, artist, album and length. The form bundles your last three days of logs, which include library file paths. See Is this a bug? and Lyrics: fetching, timed lyrics and .lrc files.

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