How LyricAI gets the words right.
Songs are harder to transcribe than speech: instruments cover the voice, singers stretch words, and some songs switch languages.
What happens to your song
1
It starts from the recording
From a Spotify link, LyricAI finds the song. From YouTube, it uses the video’s own audio, so a live take stays a live take. A Spotify song is first looked up in LRCLIB, a community lyrics database, and for an untimed sheet in lyrics.ovh. If its lyrics are there, timed when you asked for timings, the sheet is free, or 1 credit translated.
2
It separates the voice from the music
Before anything is written down, the singing is separated from the drums, guitars and backing track, so the speech recognition model hears the voice alone.
3
It detects the language, then picks the AI model for it
LyricAI detects the sung language. English, Japanese and Mandarin then go to a speech recognition model tuned for sung lyrics, which made fewer mistakes in our tests; other languages go to a general model. A song that switches languages is timed part by part, each in its own language.
4
It checks against the published lyrics
For a Spotify song, LyricAI compares what it heard with the published lyrics it found. If they match, you get those exact lines. If they don’t, or there are none, you get what was sung.
5
Every line is timed to the voice
Each line is matched to the moment it’s sung, so it lights up on time in your music player or under your video.
6
It translates for meaning
Each line is translated with the whole song in mind and set under the original, into any of 36 languages. The translation follows the meaning, so it doesn’t rhyme or fit the melody.
7
It adds romanization when you turn it on
Turn on Romanization and each Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Thai line gets romaji, pinyin, Revised Romanization or Thai romanization under it. It’s free: the first time, it sends one more request, and the result stays with the sheet. Download the sheet as LRC, SRT, TXT, Markdown or JSON.
Sakura SakuraSample
Sung in Japanese
Matches the published lyrics
- 0:02さくら さくら
sakura sakura
Cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms
- 0:07弥生の空は
yayoi no sora wa
Beneath the springtime sky
- 0:13見わたす限り
miwatasu kagiri
As far as the eye can see
How we test
We test on 63 real songs in 15 languages, with lyrics checked against independent sources, including two-language songs, long intros and songs over 6 minutes. A language moves to another speech recognition model only when that model clearly does better on these songs.
Prices and refunds
The price before you start
Every link and file shows its length and cost before you press Get lyrics.
Refunds you don’t have to ask for
If a song fails, its credits come back on their own. Audio a minute or more shorter than charged gets the difference back.
Credits that never expire
No subscription. Buy credits once and use them any time.
Private by default
Audio from links isn’t kept by LyricAI. Uploaded files are deleted once transcribed. Lyric sheets are deleted from our servers after 24 hours; your browser keeps a copy unless you turn that off. Our processing provider keeps an encrypted copy of the audio for up to 7 days, then deletes it.
What’s still hard
Heavily processed or buried vocals, several people singing at once, and very fast passages. Check names and fast lines against the song. If the language is detected wrong, set it in Language of the song, under the link.