Why Harmonic is Dead
August 3rd, 2009
Well, it looks like the music industry has demonstrated its shortsightedness yet again. Harmonic, everyone’s favorite lyric fetching widget, will no longer be able to fetch lyrics. LyricWiki has stopped allowing developers from accessing lyrics via their API due to pressure and licensing restrictions from record labels.
LyricWiki cannot be faulted for this, however. They provide a great service and attempt to do so without stepping on the feet of the music industry. If they were to ignore the label’s demands they would most likely have a lawsuit on their hands within minutes. Mind you, LyricWiki is still allowed to exist, presumably after paying a hefty licensing fee, but that application developers can’t access it. This is just another bit of flailing as the music industry continues crafting its own demise.
Record companies are quickly becoming irrelevant. We don’t need them to get our music anymore. We want to support the artists, not the record labels. Believe me, I am not one of those people who arrogantly and disingenuously says things like “information wants to be free” as an excuse to pirate music. Music has value. Pirating is not a right, and it deprives artists of money. Even if artists get a tiny sum after the label takes its cut, they still get some money and supporting art is important. I don’t mind paying for music. What I do mind, however, is when record labels try to protect the lyrics for no reason at all. Lyrics are included in liner notes in physical albums, but not on digital downloads. Nobody is selling the lyrics, not even the record companies, so how is a free database of lyrics a threat to anybody?
So that, dear readers, is why Harmonic can no longer access new lyrics. It can still find lyrics that have been saved previously in iTunes, but that’s about it. This is frustrating for you guys, and it’s frustrating for me. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to fix this problem. Harmonic is free, and I don’t have the resources to license lyrics on my own, nor would I. It shouldn’t cost money to get lyrics for songs one already owns.
I need your advice. I haven’t found another lyric site with an API, and I don’t want to get involved in the moving target of screen scraping. How do we proceed from here? Leave a comment or email me with your suggestions.
I agree that it’s inane to charge for lyrics. It’s just another petty, power-grabbing, customer-repelling move from these guys.
PS. I’ve enjoyed Harmonic for a couple months, anyway. Thanks for your efforts!
It’s a shame that such a brilliant service and Widget have(for the mean time) been essentially killed, I had this constantly open and several times a day was going to the Dashboard for my lyrics(did it a couple of minutes ago too, force of habit)
Good luck in trying to revive it, I’d love to see it back
This is such a shame; I’ll miss your widget dearly.
Fuck the RIAA!
This really sucks. I still open up the dashboard for lyrics subconsciously.
Is it possible to supplement the “Google Search” button with a “LyricWiki” button to facilitate manual copying and pasting?
i’ll miss this widget so much!
love the widget, but now my saved lyrics are being replaced by:
Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers we can no longer return lyrics through the LyricWiki API (where this application gets some or all of its lyrics).
The lyrics for this song can be found at the following URL:
http://lyricwiki.org/blahblahblah
(Please note: this is not the fault of the developer who created this application, but is a restriction imposed by the music publishers themselves.)
So now I’m going to delete it until this issue is fixed (replacing old lyrics with the new disclaimer/whatever). It was great while it lasted.
This gives me such a bitter feeling inside. I was so happy using Harmonic, and grateful for all the work you guys and lyricwiki had done to make this possible.
http://lyricsfly.com/ has an API – useable? Hope to see Harmonic working again! Thank you for a wonderful widget!
This BLOWS! This has for a long time been one of my top three widgets ever.
With pointless stunts like these, the RIAA is digging its own grave. I have purchased about 90% of all of my music (the other 10% I did pirate to test, if liked I bought, if not I deleted) and I’m now starting to look at the idea of sending them to hell and just torrent everything.
I really do hope you guys get Harmonic up and running ASAP. Also, I think someone else pointed out a good idea, the URL that the widget is providing right now, can it be hyper-linked so that we can just click it on the widget to go to the site instead of having to copy-paste?
Great work and keep it up!
Alex
So who, specifically, is at fault for this a$$igning development? Is it the RIAA (and its corral of lawyers), or some other party or parties? I read almost daily of new shenanigans the RIAA and their ilk perpetrate. It seems that it may be time to start requesting explanations directly from the perpetrators. They should not be allowed to crouch chittering in the shadows while developers and web admins are forced to apologize for them. If the RIAA or another group issues a “Cease and Desist” order or some other form of threat post that communication and provide links for commenting back to the source of the problem. Let’s shine a light on the source of the problem.
Screenscraping the lyric wiki HTML can fix this problem. If you don’t want to do that then how about opensourcing harmonic so that someone else can?
I’ve used Harmonic for just 2 DAYS! 2 DAYS! and look what all those fucking record companies did. Trying to drown anything that gets (slightly) in their way. I’ve enjoyed this little app so much, and now it’s all dead in the water. But you did great, what you need to know is that you’ve helped us lots through the months, you’ve dedicated something. The thing I would suggest is we all work together, set up a site with API, or find one. And then all developers start recoding. If the companies sues the site, go on court with them, i bet even the artists won’t care what the hell people do with their lyrics. So thats it! Work hard, you’ll be back!
Fetch the lyrics from lyricwiki based on the returned url, drop everything outside of lyrics tags…
Hey, I am the developer of TuneLyrics and it’s really bad but there’s a workaround which is to parse the lyrics from the raw html. But it’s still kinda like a cat-and-mouse game — they remove and we find a way around it. But anyway good luck!! Hopefully you can find a fix around it!!
I miss you, Harmonic. Please let us know when you find another solution and get this app back up! It’s one of my favorites.
And a big “Boo, hiss!” to the labels. I agree, it’s inane to restrict lyrics, and seems like a ridiculous move on their part.
Harmonic is one of my favourite widgets, I miss it… As a, hopefully temporary, solution, I installed Tunestext. It’s design is far from sleek, thus less intuitive, especially compared to Harmonic. But, it manages to find a lot of lyrics, even pretty obscure ones. I don’t want to plug it, maybe you can look into I and see if there’s a solution to get Harmonic back on again. Darn, only because the music industry still doesn’t recognize free advertising when it smiles in it’s face …
http://www.cyanworks.net/dboardTunesTEXT.html
here’s what you can do: download tunestext as said before and then go to its preferences and set it to download -only- from sing365.com
Unbelievable. These idiots are costing themselves money. They are irritating people to the point that they won’t buy as much music anymore. Crippling people’s enjoyment of combining lyrics plus the music they love is crazy. They are truly the business world equivalent of satan!!!
It was great while it lasted, thanks.
Can you change the text to a hyperlink or add another button to the paste/google toolbar so we can cut and paste a little easier?
If you don’t want to get into screen scraping, could you incorporate a webkit browser into Harmonic, let the user select the lyrics text, and have a one-button copy to Harmonic?
not at all surprised. Great while it lasted, by far my most used widget, and was glad to paypal a donation your way long ago after getting the widget and loving it. I more than got that value out of it, but hate to see it stop working.
If the RIAA wants to act this way, they need to meet half way and start including lyrics in songs purchased online… that or back off.
I noticed that LyricWiki allows you to use MediaWiki’s Special:Export feature. If you go to http://lyricwiki.org/Special:Export/Modest_Mouse:Float_On you will find XML returned. In mediawiki->page->revision->text is the wikitext of the page. From there, it should be very easy to strip away all text outside of the or tag. For any song, to get the wikitext returned in XML format, go to lyricwiki.org/Special:Export/Artist:Title. This might be the best approach, and it seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to impliment. I hope this helps, and I hope you find a solution.
I just created a proof-of-concept script on my webpage to show how easy it is to extract lyrics from lyricwiki from the Special:Export page. Go to http://shardsofmetal.com/lyricwiki/lyricwiki.php and enter an artist and song title of a song you know Lyricwiki has lyrics for (spelling must be identical, and the first letter of every word, even words like “the” and “or” must start with a capital). The script shows the lyrics, in a pre tag so line breaks are kept without changing the text to include br tags. However, I could give it br tags with little effort. Of course, this is using php, so it would be different to do with the widget, but this script proves that it’s possible.
Zach: Your script doesn’t seem to work. The XML export however, does. This seems reliable and is a Mediawiki feature (hence not subject to major changes) and not Lyricwiki exclusive.
The legality of it is disputable, but hard to pursue without taking the whole site down. Which, of course, will lead to new sites providing exactly the same service. Just like what.cd did to oink.cd.
If Mindquirk doesn’t open source or parse the XML, someone else will. Post here if you come over a widget as elegant as Harmonic!
Meanwhile, it seems the API no longer serves the broken message and just returns “not found”. You can bring up your widget again, folks. It still displays lyrics already downloaded perfectly.
Discovered this while poking around in the widget to see if I could disable lyric fetching or new song detection.
I set my “var shouldCheckNet = true;” to false in harmonic.js just to be sure anyway. No idea if it works (can’t see why it shouldn’t), but better safe than having to manually remove the broken API message in a mess of songs..
If any of the people responsible for the change are reading this, could you at least enlight upon us why you don’t want us to download the lyrics for our favourite songs in a sane way? I really don’t care to bother with a browser to grab lyrics for the song I’m listening to, especially not while offline (iPhone displays ID3 lyrics).
And to Mindquirk: thanks for a great time. I really hope you come up with a solution to get the widget working as intended.
You could also try to use lyricsplugin.com’s lyrics. Take a look at this add-on for Songbird: http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1230
It allows the user to choose between lyricwiki and lyricsplugin. I’m sure one can port the code from there to this widget.
Marius: My script does work, it’s just more picky about artist name and song title spellings then the LyricWiki API was, because the API matched common misspellings, and existence/lack of words like “the.” For example, http://shardsofmetal.com/lyricwiki/lyricwiki.php?artist=Modest+Mouse&title=Ocean+Breathes+Salty works fine, as does http://shardsofmetal.com/lyricwiki/lyricwiki.php?artist=Jimmy+Eat+World&title=The+Middle . I figured that the widget could use the API to find the exact spelling of the song it’s looking for, then use this method to actually find the lyrics. This script didn’t take me too long to write in PHP, and I’d imagine there is a similar function to match text in the language the widget is written in.
Maybe this is helping you: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=lyricslyricwiki
Hi Mindquirk guys,
I’m using right now a Apple Script made by Doug Adams that fetch the lyrics searching into the XHTML generated by LW using “curl” shell command:
do shell script “curl ” & quoted form of lyricWikiPageURL & “|grep \”‘lyricbox’\”|sed -e \”s///g\”|sed -e’s//” & (ASCII character 13) & “/g’”
I think you should check it => http://tinyurl.com/c7e3jn
This is a bad news. I’m really sorry about that: Harmonic was one of my favourite widget. Thanks for it, I hope you’ll find a solution!
The LyricWiki API is NOT dead…it was recently changed. Harmonic needs to be updated to work with the changes.
http://shullian.com/get_lyrical.php still works (3.3.2) released on 8/14/09.
Well, sorry to hear this, thanks for a great program that “just worked”. It was wonderful while it lasted, fortunately most of my library is populated.
ahhh bummer. no more karaoke sessions
hey, on my widget it says there is an update available, although when i click on the link it only comes up with this page http://mindquirk.com/, so if someone could help it would be appreciated.
thanks, josh
i don’t think the API is totally gone, either. with the move to wikia, the lyrics are now licensed. as matthew points out above, “get lyrical” still works, because it fetches lyrics from the lyric.wiki part of wikia. maybe you could update harmonic similarly?
Get lyrical is AMAZING. I’m very sorry for Harmonic but at this time get lyrical does a great job finding lyrics and putting them into itunes. You can also select all songs from itunes and click “tag selection”…. I prefer to have harmonic ’cause is the best widget i have but for now…
Wow – just discovered it and am totally disappointed that it no longer works. Any chance the suggestions from Matthew or kim will solve the problem? Looks like it was terrific when it did work – but I have no use for something that will only “find” what I’ve already tediously found and cut & pasted. Keep up the great work, and I do hope you can find a solution!
Is there any news on the updating of Harmonic to get data from the new LyricWiki api?
It’s started kind of working again. Now, we get the first paragraph of lyrics with [...] attached to the bottom. Progress, I think.
I miss your widget!! I get the first lines, too, is that a good sign? happy to hear more news…
I just read your comment about the licensing issues from the record companies, que lastima!! Really enjoyed your widget up to now.
Perhaps you could adjust the widget to leave the search option only as I find that I can get the lyrics in any case on webpages that have them for whatever reason. Would that be a license issue for you? It appears that would not work for all users but it could be a partial/temporary solution?
Hi all. Get Lyrical will/does work!!! It will search for the lyrics of every song in your iTunes library and tag them to the song and then harmonic can see them – or get lyrical can too for that matter. Nice work guys. When I was growing up I never really knew exactly what the words were to songs. It’s a brave new world now…
Hiiii..yes lyrical workksssss! and the harmonic is the same again!!!!=D
Thank u guys!
Hi there, I just got Harmonic and love the app, but too bad about the issues you’re having with the Lyricwiki API and licensing. Most of the songs I get only get the first few lines. I’d like to suggest displaying a small icon or link next to the title of the song that goes to the URL of the song in LyricWiki. This would really make the app much more useful. Right now, if I get a partial lyrics, I have to clear the lyrics, then click on the google search link and click on a result to get lyrics from some other site. It’d be nice if I could just click once on this icon and jump to the actual page on LyricWiki to see all the lyrics even when they’re not all downloaded.
I will miss Harmonic. It was the best app of its kind. It will be dearly missed :(.
Hope you can bring it back to life, until that day, RIP Harmonic.
FUCK THE RIAA/MPAA
Here’s CNET Editor Brian Tong’s favorite iTunes song lyrics grabber: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/music/cantopod.html
Hope this gets all of you up and running again.
i know how hard it is to find a lyrics widget that works… at the time of posting this comment this is the ONLY widget i found that worked properly:
http://www.addictivetips.com/mac-os/display-lyrics-of-current-itunes-song-on-desktop/