Minilyrics - Spells Your Favorite Songs

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Automatic lyrics display for your favorite songs
  • (3 more, see all...)

Having your music played has become such a regular activity that installing a full featured music player on your computer is absolutely compulsory. Players now provide sophisticated plug-ins and complex features, but it's not about them I want to talk here. Personally, I enjoy small ad-ons that do a great job in the long run. You can listen to music in many ways, and sometimes maybe you're not even paying attention to details, but this time, I bet you will.

One important detail about music refers to lyrics. And it's not the poetical reference that so many people risk to associate with it, but it's simply the practical need of having a song's lyrics displayed on the screen. Minilyrics is a handy lyrics viewer that synchronizes the lines with the playing song. Not such a big deal you might say, but imagine that it is designed to work perfectly with 13 known music players and it works as a powerful standalone lyrics search engine.

You'll surely say that searching lyrics on the internet is not that difficult and anyone can do it, but only imagine how much time you waste until you open a default web browser, type in the entire name of the artist or song and then select the appropriate result! With Minilyrics you don't even need to have your hands over the mouse or keyboard. Lyrics will be displayed for you in the Minilyrics's panel as rapidly as songs change in the playlist. Of course, the Search and Download lyrics window offers a great facility as you can access it whenever you want to save lyrics for a certain song that is playing.

I currently tested Minilyrics on Windows Media Player, Winamp and Real Player and I was surprised to find out that it really works well on each of the three applications. You may see this in the sample snapshots, too. If somehow you've got enough of the text flowing down your desktop, you can easily send Minilyrics to the system tray, where from you will be able to access it at any time.

Minilyrics appears first in a side part of your player as well as in the system tray. What's good is that you can move it wherever you want on the desktop, be it exactly next to your player or as a stand-alone component in a desktop area that you will find more convenient for lyrics displaying. You will see that Minilyrics remembers its last position.

Dealing with a complex menu, you'll find yourself spending pretty much time trying to choose a skin for Minilyrics as it comes with so many color schemes that you will definitely find the one that fits your player's skin colors. Note that Minilyrics has an included Winamp-like skin and two default skins that match with the Windows XP style.

The Lyrics display settings are various and they allow you to choose from a large list of styles: you can view the lyrics in a multiple, normal or double line, as well as in static text style or a movie subtitle style. You may also select to display lyrics in a Karaoke or fade in/ fade out style.

The Good

One very good thing that can be said about Minilyrics is the fact that even if it comes as an unregistered version, it doesn't have an expiring trial and it allows you to use it for as much as you want, of course, as long as you don't feel too uncomfortable with dealing with the nag reminder screen that prompts each time you run and stop the application.

The Bad

The only uncomfortable thing that I found about Minilyrics, and I just think I didn't get used to yet, is the fact you must first run the player application and just after that Minilyrics opens, too.

The Truth

I think Minilyrics gets its job done and, quite frankly, there's nothing I couldn't be satisfied about.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

user interface 5
features 5
ease of use 4
pricing / value 3


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent
 
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