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Evil Lyrics delivers songs to your desktop

Nick

Nick

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evil lyricsOne way of enriching your musical experience is to learn the lyrics to all those songs you know and love. Thanks to Evil Lyrics, music lovers have an easy way to do just that every time they listen to MP3’s on their PC. Evil Lyrics is a small plug-in that displays the lyrics of songs as they play as long as you’ve got an internet connection.

Once installed, Evil Lyrics starts every time you open your default media player. The window floats in a small browser style window at the side of the player but it can be minimised to the tray if you don’t want it sat there. The window also provides additional links to Google searches, Amazon album profiles, translations, offline storage and other album or song related data. The plug-in was designed originally for Winamp (which is what we tested it in) but it now works with Windows Media Player, Foobar2000 and Sonique. It’s also supposed to be compatible with Media Player XP although many users have reported problems with this particular player.

One of the best features of Evil Lyrics is that it’s very light and does the job discreetly without affecting other running applications. But most importantly, does it recall the lyrics accurately? Well, the truth is it’s not perfect but it does surprisingly well. In tests, we found that at least 80% of the time, it displayed the correct lyrics for the song in progress. The accuracy of this is very much down to you though. If the ID tags of your MP3’s are not entered accurately, then you’ll either end up with some very random results or simply nothing at all. There is a ‘Search Again’ button if this happens in which case Evil Lyrics tries to find the next closest match but we found it very rarely worked accurately. More often than not, you’ll end up with Michael Jackson rather than Jackson Browne when using this secondary option. Evil Lyrics retrieves the info from it’s ‘Ello Lyrics’ database which claims to have literally hundreds of thousands of songs.

One nice little feature is that lyrics are cached for offline playback so you can also read your favourite lyrics on the move. There’s also a karaoke mode where Evil Lyrics searches its karaoke database for lyrics but this is significantly more limited than the normal database. In classic karaoke style, the lyrics appear in huge luminous letters within the window which can be expanded to fill the screen meaning you can host your own karaoke parties.

On the downside, as mentioned earlier, it’s not 100% accurate with the lyrics. In the case of Winamp too, there doesn’t seem to be any way to minimize and restore Evil Lyrics when you minimize and restore the audio player itself. Nevertheless, it’s a fun little plug-in that’ll help you get more out of music or at the least, improve your karaoke skills.

Nick

Nick

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