Harmonic – 2.3
May 16th, 2008
Hot of the heels of the previous release, Harmonic has been updated to version 2.3. Here’s what’s new:
- New, more compact, design for the options toolbar
- “Clear Lyrics” button now works correctly
- Additional international support for artists and titles with special characters in the name, like Mötorhead
After the jump, there’s a story! A boring story! For developers!
And now, a little design aside you might find interesting (but probably won’t). This is just a sort of long-winded story about a minor change to Harmonic. This change is in the new options toolbar: the removal of the “paste lyrics” button when there are already lyrics available. The reason for this is that I have been inundated with comments, reviews, and emails about the paste button not working correctly.
However, the paste button has always worked correctly but it seems like the previous placement in Harmonic has revealed that a startling amount of people do not understand how copy and paste works.
Every single person who contacted me about this was attempting to use the “paste” button to insert the existing lyrics into iTunes (which Harmonic does automatically — if you see the lyrics in Harmonic, they are saved in iTunes). The confusion, I believe, is partially related to the Dashboard metaphor, which implies a layer ancillary to the normal “application” layer, as widgets do not have the standard accoutrements of applications: active icons in the Dock, visibility in the Command + Tab application switcher panel, or a menu bar. The key item here is the last one: a menu bar. When you activate Dashboard, you can still see the active menu bar of the application you were using (presumably iTunes in this case). This can be confusing, especially with a function like copy and paste which is an application-wide function. Because of this, and because of Harmonic’s tight integration with iTunes anyway, there is an expectation that the widget is somehow “part” of iTunes’ interface. Therefore, the “paste” button is assumed to perform an operation on *iTunes* rather than Harmonic.
This assumption is certainly flawed, because the other buttons in the widget do not perform an operation on iTunes except for the “Clear Lyrics” button. Except, if someone was under the impression that they needed to insert the lyrics into iTunes then they likely would not also think that “Clear Lyrics” cleared the lyrics in iTunes. But the major flaw in this logic is the fundamental misunderstanding of copy and paste: to expect the lyrics to be *pasted* somewhere, they would first have to be *copied*. This, I think, is another example of people who are not too familiar with computers muddling up the terms, such as when people use “download” when they mean “install”. This, of course, is to be expected and it is the job of the designer to make the application easy to use for everybody. This kind of thing, however, rather difficult for “power users” (that’s a dumb term, but I can’t think of a better one) to consider when laying out an interface. Thinking about this will help you design something that is always clear. So, the moral of the story is to assume nothing about your users when designing an interface. Wasn’t that a great story? I’ve got more!
rather confusing story
but thanks for the good work i love this lil widget!
Hi!
I really like Harmonic but sometimes I don’t want the lyrics to be automatically written into the song file.
How about a selection in the options to switch writing lyrics into the file on/off?
Would be great because I always have to remove Harmonic from my Dashboard after using it to prevent this
Andi
i understand your story and it would be good for me to keep in mind for when i design my own software (ok thats more of an if but i do wanna) im making an interactive CD at the moment and ill remember this before i burn it thanks for the great app =) the paste never confused me but i guess you cant assume anything in this world. one suggestion would it be possible to edit the lyrics by hand in the Harmonic widget in future updates, i have seen this done in other (but not as good) lyric widgets. thanks again =)
OMG, I was one of those stupid people!!! HA! I laugh at myself.
Five Stars.
I understand your story completely. I never thought Paste did anything other than what you intended it to do, but I can see why people would get confused.
But anyway, the only habit I have to change now is that I have to Clear Lyrics and then Paste again if I want to paste corrected lyrics. No harm done I guess.
While I never misunderstood the buttons, I think the interface is a lot cleaner now.
Also, with these new look – anyone you could add a “mark as instrumental”-button or something? For a lot of instrumental songs it just keeps on spitting out “Can’t Find Lyrics” and that annoys me.
Just a small thing, Harmonic is still the best Lyrics widget out there.
i love the idea, but it dosnt work for me, i tested more than 10 tracks .. no lyrics
I worship this widget…one small issue on the new update: The bottom containing the drag/expand corner becomes invisible.
Also, please answer my e-mail – we wanna kick ya business!
xx
A agree that a “mark as instrumental” button would be awesome.
Thanks for Harmonic!
Definitely my favorite widget. I use it all the time!
One suggestion: Would it be difficult for the widget to auto-scroll to keep up with the lyrics in the song? I know I could expand it so that the whole song appears in the window, but I would prefer to not have the widget size so large.
@Siddif
Agreed, that would make Harmonic one step better than perfect!
Could you fix this so that it’s not spewing the lyrics into system.log? each time you start / stop a song or pull up the dashboard it injects the lyrics (with html) into the system.log and making an absolute mess of this log file.
Actually scrolling through the system.log file, each song seems to have been inserted into the log file at least 2 times, some as many as 5. Great for debugging, not great for this end =)
Also, for the song (Don’t) fear the reaper – The mutton birds these lyrics were inserted :
[0x0-0x12012].com.apple.dock[276]: 2008-05-24 23:54:05.723 DashboardClient[549:10b] com.mindquirk.widget.harmonic: {{Wikipedia}}==[[TheMuttonBirds:Salty(1993)|Salty (1993)]]=={{Album Art|TheMuttonBirds-Salty.jpg|The Mutton Birds: Salty}}# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:The Heater|The Heater]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Ngaire|Ngaire]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:You Will Return|You Will Return]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Wellington|Wellington]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:In My Room|In My Room]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:When The Wind Comes Round|When The Wind Comes Round]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Queen's English|Queen's English]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Salty My Dear|Salty My Dear]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:There's A Limit|There's A Limit]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Esther|Esther]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:No Telling When|No Telling When]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Anchor Me|Anchor Me]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Too Close To The Sun|Too Close To The Sun]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Don't Fight It, Marsha, It's Bigger Than Both Of Us|Don't Fight It, Marsha, It's Bigger Than Both Of Us]]”’==Other Songs==# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:A Thing Well Made|A Thing Well Made]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Another Morning|Another Morning]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:April|April]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Envy of Angels|Envy of Angels]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Like This Train|Like This Train]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:She's Been Talking|She's Been Talking]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Straight To Your Head|Straight To Your Head]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:Trouble With You|Trouble With You]]”’# ”’[[TheMutton Birds:White Valiant|White Valiant]]”’[[Category:Genre/Rock]]{{Artist| wikipedia = The Mutton Birds| artist = The Mutton Birds| officialSite = | fLetter = M}}{{Hometown| country = New Zealand| state = | hometown = }}
not the lyrics at all, just a listing. Not sure if it’s your end or the lyric servers, but not useful.
great widget otherwise.
how about naming the button “Paste into song in iTunes” ?
I read your story, and as a developer myself I agree with you.
BTW, I found a small but annoying bug: lyricwiki.org sometimes suffer of a shortage of resources, resulting in a ‘Too many connections’ message returned for any request. This message is used by Harmonic and saved in the mp3 file…
And, IMHO, you should definitely reduce messages in system.log to errors only
Also getting the “Too many connections” thing…
Kind of a pain because now I have no idea which songs it “infected”.
Great widget anyway, been loving it ever since I started using it.
ditto “too many connections” – whassup with that? it erased over my saved lyrics in iTunes – even for songs it never got from Lyricwiki. Is it possible to program Harmonic so it can see if there are already lyrics housed in iTunes, it does not try and retrieve and overwrite them again?
The “Too many connections” error will be fixed in the next release, this is a problem with LyricWiki.
I’m also adding the “mark as instrumental” button.
In Leopard you can use Spotlight to search for mp3s that contain “too many connections”.
A Button to allow posting lyrics from itunes to lyricwiki.
Great job.
You should do a double check to be sure you’re writing the lyrics to the appropiate mp3, because if you’re switching fast between songs, sometimes it writes the lyrics from an old track on the playlist to the actual track playing…
try getting lyrics for any band with “&” in the band name, and it fails. also might be worth looking at the API at lyricsfly.com
Is it just me, or did resizing the widget change? The three resizing lines just drag the widget, but to resize, you have to click above them.
About my above comment, I restarted Dashboard and it’s a little better.
But for another comment, I liked how v. 2.2 handled the “Clear lyrics” feature more than how it currently does.
I have a lot of lyrics from previous widgets that put the lyrics in incorrectly, so it was cool when Harmonic replaced that stuff with the almost always perfect LyricWiki lyrics.
I think you guys should make this lyrics searcher “smarter”. I find that if my Itunes track is not labeled with the track name and artist exactly correct, the widget will never pull up lyrics. If it worked more like an actual “search”, where answers that are approximately correct came up, that would be helpful. And if the approximated search brings up lyrics for the wrong song, they can just be cleared. Or maybe we could even see possible matches inside the widget?
@George
That’s a good point, and it’s something we’re interested in doing in the future.
I haven’t used Harmonic, but I wish it was an application rather than a Dashboard Widget. I normally have Dashboard disabled because it seems to be a hassle to manually start & stop Widgets, and if you leave a bunch of Widgets going Dashboard becomes a CPU hog. Why not a simple Menu Item that I can turn on-off, or something that launches and quits with iTunes? (again, as an application, not a Dashboard Widget)?
@Kris
A Dashboard widget is the most unobtrusive method I can think of for downloading and displaying lyrics.
The CPU use of Dashboard is entirely dependent on what widgets are running, and how many, so if you are worried about that then only run a few widgets, or just Harmonic. (I am also unsure what you are talking about with having to “manually start and stop widgets”, because that is not possible with Dashboard. Also, it’s not possible to “disable” Dashboard either, as far as I know.)
A menu item clutters up the menu bar and is unnecessary since Harmonic is completely automatic, not to mention there is no elegant way to display lyrics in a menu or floating window.
In short, re-doing Harmonic as something other than a Dashboard widget is not something we plan to do.
Hi, I love harmonic – i run it side by side with sing that itune since usually one of them finds the lyrics.
However, harmonic is causing me an issue. every time a new songs starts, a couple of seconds in there is a break in the music. this skipping is being caused by harmonic since when i remove it the problem goes away. from reading this website i suspect this is due to harmonic inserting the lyrics in to itunes, because exactly the same issue occurs if i edit the tags in itunes when that song is playing. is there a way (a hidden setting maybe?) to stop it inserting them this please?
James,
This only happens with a song that hasn’t had lyrics added, right?
I remember seeing in another lyric app, that I had in the past, an option to add the lyrics when the song ends.
I would like it if there was a way to update the lyrics from the site after they have been added to the song file. I just saw a song that had incorrect lyrics (which had previously been retrieved from lyricwiki). To update the lyrics I had to clear the lyrics and then switch tracks to force it to search for the lyrics again.
Thanks for the great widget. But I agree with the other comments, that sometimes I don’t want my lyrics to be saved. There should be an option to let the program do it or not. It cuts off the song to save the lyrics, and its a little annoying.
Beautiful widget though, thanks!
I completely agree with DHR. Often whenever I’m just skipping through on shuffle mode, songs will have the lyrics of the one before hand. Other than that very solid widget, thanks so much!
Hi, thanks for the nice widget. But since a couple of weeks I have the problem, that the lyrics will be shown for half a second and then switch to ‘Can’t find lyrics’. Maybe upgrade to 10.5.4 cause this?
I’ve noticed Harmonic becomes sporadically unresponsive in Activity Monitor (dashboardclient) process. Especially noticeable since 10.5.4 and 10.5.5.
Feature request: To be able to delay the writing of lyrics until after the song has finished playing. Why? Well, for those like myself who have their iTunes media on an offline volume or network connection, there can be a significant delay while the MP3 file is updated. So in practice, the music plays for 1 second, pauses for another second while the file is updated, then continues.
By delaying the update to the file, this pause can be avoided.
There was another lyric updater that gives this option and it works very well, but not as nice as Harmonic!
It would be great if you could turn off inserting lyrics into the ID3 tag. I like it the idea of being able to see lyrics in Dashboard, but I don’t really need them in the song’s ID3 tags, which I try to leave as clean as possible.
try getting Bob Dylan:Pretty Boy Floyd. no result. Lyricwiki’s bug or Harmonic? I can’t tell for sure.
I read through all of these posts to make sure my request wasn’t already addressed and finally came upon those toward the end who suggest saving the lyrics to the file after the song has played to avoid the annoying break at the beginning of tracks that are being updated. I can almost tolerate it when listening by myself (I figure at least it won’t happen again for that particular track), but disabling Harmonic has become an absolute must anytime I have guests over. Unfortunately, I usually don’t remember to do so until it happens a couple times — and often right after I’ve shown off how I can play my iTunes wirelessly in different rooms of the house and control it all via my iPhone. “What’s with the annoying breaks in songs, though?” Besides the annoyance of having to go to my computer to disable Harmonic, it always feels like a shame to have to do when I consider all of the songs that would have otherwise benefited by having lyrics added.
I second rand’s request.
Also the not saving to itunes thing.
I am a big fan of pearLyrics but it’s missing too many songs now. pearLyrics with lyrics wiki would be ideal i guess. I am stunned by how well Harmonics work.
Anyway, I guess Harmonics work great for you, the author. Harmonics is free, so I can’t be demanding but…
Like other people mentioned, I don’t like the pause before songs. Also, pearLyrics saved them as files. So there was advantage of caching the lyrics without messing with id3 tags or pause before songs. Another plus was that I had a neat “Lyrics” folder in my document that I could look at.
So big thanks for writing harmonics and giving it out for free! I think this feature is on the top of demand list, so give this a thought if you feel like it!
Echoing rand’s and others’ requests I wanted Harmonic to stop spewing into the system and console logs whenever the Dashboard is viewed. Barring a response from the developer I decided to fix it myself. It’s an easy enough process, all you need is a text editor (like TextEdit).
Navigate to the widget (probably in ~/Library/Widgets) and right-click/control-click on Harmonic.wdgt, choose “Show Package Contents.” In this window go to the “js” folder and open up the contained “harmonic.js” file in your text editor of choice. Do a find for the line that contains “alert(theLyrics);”
Simply place a comment tag in front of this line to stop the lyrics spew. In javascript syntax, commenting out this line requires two forward slashes in front of the line ie. “//alert(theLyrics);”
Put those slashes in and that’s it. Save the file then reopen the widget in Dashboard (or close and reopen it if it’s already open).
Of course if you want Harmonic to be totally log-less you can also comment out all occurrences of lines containing “alert” in that same file. Including the one mentioned above there should be three other instances: “alert(“NO new song!”)”, “alert(“new song!”)”, and “alert(x);”
I commented out the “NO new song” line (as it also pops up every time the Dashboard is activated if the song hasn’t changed) but left the “new song” and “(x)” alerts as they can at least be used to report on what the widget is doing (“x” in particular seems to only be used to log errors which is handy).
Hope this helps some people
Love the app! It’s genius!
Just one minor problem, though. Every time iTunes plays a song that doesn’t have any lyrics already saved, Harmony causes the music to “hiccup” at the beginning of the song. It’s a really annoying little glitch. It looks like others have voiced the same concern, so I apologize for sounding redundant.
I don’t know how I survived without Harmonic- it truly is the best lyric app there is. However, I’ve noticed that if you’re using it and you delete a song you’re playing, it will crash/freeze and stay stuck on that song long after you’ve deleted it. I have to close and reopen it for it to run smoothly again. Another thing: I like to use the black background, but the only fonts that look smooth are size 11 and size 14. The size 12 is bunched up and hard to read. Maybe if you guys put a size 13, it would be the perfect match. On my monitor, 11 is too small (even though it’s clear) and 14 is too big. It would be greatly appreciated, and keep up the good work.
Is there any way I can disable Harmonic automatically adding lyrics into iTunes?
@matt
Sorry, you can’t disable that feature, because it helps keep Harmonic from overloading the lyrics servers by fetching the lyrics every time.
Plus, there’s not really a disadvantage to adding the lyrics to iTunes.
I wish you could copy and paste the lyrics and be able to take them to family events where we are always singing and forgetting the lyrics.
Forgot to say THANK YOU. This is still a really wonderful little program.
What if a song is not an instrumental but it says it is? Is there anyway to clear the treble clef instrumental symbol?
Very nice Widget!
Unfortunately I have two problems with Harmonic:
- It often shows the lyrics for about half a second and then displays “Can’t find Lyrics”
- In case it works and the song text is shown longer, I still have the problem that it is not copied into the iTunes file (iTunes 8.1.1).
My iTunes library and the music is stored on a NAS. Might this be the problem?
Any ideas for that? Thanks for any help, Holgi.
Same as Holgi here, using a library stored in another mac via afp.
how do u get the lyrics on youre ipod????? i just started and dont no how!!
is there anyway to prevent itunes from pausing for half a second when itunes is being updated with lyrics?
The one thing that I’d like to see added to this application is a way to select and copy text in the lyrics field.
v2.3
Does it work on 10.6? ‘Option’ button doesn’t work! I can see only half of lyrics and then [...]. Somebody know what the problem and how to fix?
Thanks
I have the same problem as Yurkech – Only noticed this since 10.6 but I no longer get the complete lyrics
Same here. Love widget but 2.3 often shows incomplete lyrics with the [...]. I’m still using 10.5 by the way.
Same here! Only half of the lyrics. Using 10.5.8
Same here, three o four lines ended with [...]
more info, if i close and open dashboard sometime lyrics is shown
Same with me.
It’s also replaces previously stored (and correct) lyrics with the first four lines plus [...]
OS X 10.6.2
iTunes 9.0.2
same issue with incomplete lyrics and ellipsis [...]
osx 10.5.8, itunes 902
switched to a different widget, TunesTEXT 0.8.3
not as nice as Harmonic but doesn’t have the ellipsis problem
same problem here, I seem to be downloading lyrics for songs most of the times, they appear incomplete even if they were downloaded previously… sometimes, you can see lyrics for a few seconds, and then it displays “can’t find lyrics”, is there a way to fix it??? great app anyway!!