14 DAY TRIAL // I guess there aren't but very few people who don't like to sing, whatever music they would sing. And, as I say "sing", I'm not speaking about humming but about proper singing, following their favorite artists, trying to keep up with them or even accompanying them. And for this, you have to know the lyrics and if you're not a magazine-buyer or just like music without spending money on artists' CDs, then you may have a problem finding the exact lyrics.
Even more, there are people who simply like to read the lyrics of what they are listening to, so they find out more about the music they like, what are those artists singing about and so on. And - especially when searching the internet for lyrics is not one of your current tasks - softwares which automatically do this for you, as you are actually listening to music, have been developed and some even became rather popular.
The Looks
There's not much to say about the looks of the Lyrics Seeker, as it is a simple plug-in for iTunes, Winamp or Windows Media Player, which consists of a system tray icon and a very simple menu. Obviously, since Lyrics Seeker is rather a function-oriented program than a "looker", it does not sport a too fancy interface.
Actually, as you start your player, the Lyrics Seeker automatically places the icon in the tray-area and it is already working. As songs go by in the playlist, the Lyrics Seeker will look for their lyrics and - the moment it had found something - it will pop-up a balloon or say nothing - if you decided to shut down this feature from the settings menu.
No skins and no color schemes are available, since this would really be futile for such a small piece of code. The only menu is a very small window with few controls for the way Lyrics Seeker announces finding lyrics, all in the classical Windows XP-native colors and styling, with counters and checkboxes which are dead-simple to use and understand.
Before trying this software, I thought it will display lyrics in a window of its own, but I was very wrong: Lyrics Seeker will prompt you to click the balloon in order to access the lyrics, but this opens a browser page, as all the lyrics are online and can't be consulted on the spot. Overall, I'd finally add that Lyrics Seeker has absolutely nothing graphically futile and the minimal (rather inexistent "design") is definitely not a minus this time.
The Works
First of all, I have to note that Lyrics Seeker does not operate on all sites online neither can the user specify where it should look for songs' words; instead, it will only search the databases on www.metrolyrics.com. Too bad this means that lyrics for lots of songs won't be available, because if you listen to not-so-popular music, the chances for it to have been indexed in MetroLyrics are rather zero. Nevertheless, should the artist you are currently listening to be listed on MetroLyrics, the Lyrics Seeker will let you know in just moments; it looks more like Lyrics Seeker is some sort of connection-plugin and not a standalone program in the strongest sense of the word: basically, it scans what you are playing and looks for matching info in just one database.
The moment you play a song whose lyrics have been stored in the MetroLyrics' databases, a notification balloon pops out and lets you know this, while prompting you to click it. Doing so opens the default web browser on your PC and displays the MetroLyrics page corresponding to the song. The balloon goes away and after a time you can specify it according to your own likes. After it has disappeared, as you hover your mouse over the tray icon, a small tag appears and tells whether lyrics have been found or not for the currently playing track.
In a few words, this is about everything Lyrics Seeker can and will do, simple and fully automated, thus running on very low system resources and occupying extremely little space on your HDD, being totally non-intrusive and passing virtually unobserved.
The Good
The best things about the Lyrics Seeker is that it's free and very-very easy to use, while it does not consume resources.
The Bad
The single not so good thing is that it searches in only one web location, thus restricting the chances of finding certain less-than popular items.
The Truth
As Lyrics Seeker is technically undetected while residing in the system tray, it won't trouble you much; yet not much use will you make of it if you're the kind of listener who goes for the underground music. It's worth giving it a spin, but only if you have few better things to do.
Below are the (even fewer) snapshots of Lyrics Seeker that I managed to take:
