14 DAY TRIAL // There are lots and lots of people who either sing their own songs or simply like to sing other's songs. Besides having the proper voice and knowing the song, there is one more ingredient for this cultural activity: knowing the words of the songs. And for this, there are a couple of possible solutions: buying the original albums and hope the artists put their lyrics in the respective booklets; consulting the dedicated forums over the net or more convenient, searching the dedicated databases existing on the internet, blogs and such like.
Since not anyone willing to sing his/her favorite song in the shower has the needed time to wander on the web in search of its lyrics, softwares like Lyrics Hunter have been created and further developed: they considerably reduce the time spent looking for song words and also provide more accurate results as they simultaneously search on a multitude of sites.
The Looks
Lyrics Hunter is one sober and clean-looking piece of code: a simple window, simple and easy to use and understand menus, a large area to display the results of the hunt and color management. Indeed, I can't imagine a simpler look - at the same time keeping the stylish appearance - than that of Lyrics Hunter, which is very close to the ideal of a designer obsessed by minimalism.
Basically, the Lyrics Hunter consists of a large window, in which the results of the search are displayed and whose color is customizable, 3 fill-in fields (artist, album, track) and a small amount of menus. Everything has been thought of in terms of sobriety and a very professional look: no fancy buttons or shapes, but basic clean and well-balanced spread of content over the designated area.
Both colors and fonts used for lyrics-display are customizable and the option is Windows-native, so really, there can be no problem for anyone who has ever worked with Windows OSs. The menu titles are changing color as the mouse passes over them and only when they are extended, the contained options have icons. Small and cozy, these icons are yet readable and intuitive, making the use of Lyrics Hunter an easy task for almost everyone.
Overall, I must say that I liked a lot the Graphic User Interface for Lyrics Hunter: extremely simple, yet customizable without any futile additional elements, strictly oriented towards functionality and speed.
The works
Lyrics Hunter does exactly one thing: it searches for lyrics on the internet, looking for what you have specified in the artist/album/track fields. It builds a search text string-based structure and then it looks for matching results in various websites. As it finds matching items, the Lyrics Hunter will display the results in the main window. Then you may choose to copy the text or make a selection and set it as away message in messaging applications.
The menus are very simple, yet handy: in the Edit menu, one can choose to select all and copy the resulting text and choose the "formatting" of the appearance: left/center/right alignment, as well the colors for both background and text.
The Font and Away Message are available in the Tools menu, together with the site manager, update options, few generic settings and possibly, plugins. The site manager allows you to refine and direct the search process, by indicating web locations where Lyrics Hunter should search for your fav lyrics. Needless to say that, if you're looking for Britney Spears' songs lyrics, you don't want Lyrics Hunter to look on a metal-lyrics website such as www.darklyrics.com :))
One final thing: the Lyrics Hunter is a resident of the system tray, so it will neither bother you, nor uselessly occupy space in your taskbar. Well, that's about all on this little program; enjoy the conclusions and the screenshots:
The Good
What I liked best in Lyrics Hunter: it's fast, you can decide exactly where it should search, its GUI is almost simplicity brought to perfection.
The Bad
Still, I guess the search algorithm is not as efficient as it could be; hopefully, the next versions will be improved.
The Truth
A very nice free software for the passionate out there, offering a nice resource for lyrics.
Now, the screenshots, so you can actually see what I was talking about:
