UPDATED: Lyrics Tag Viewer v1.2

View and edit a selected track’s Custom Lyrics tag in a non-modal window, which, unlike a track’s Info panel, will not block keyboard and mouse activity in the Music app’s interface.

Whereas the Comments tag can only accept about 250 text characters, the “Custom Lyrics” tag can hold a lot of text. And I mean a lot of text. Custom Lyrics text will also get written to a track’s file as metadata. So it’s an ideal place to store information about an album. Especially if you’re not interested in storing lyrics there.

I got in the habit of using the Lyrics tag of the first track of an album to store liner-note-caliber text snippets about the album. Or actual liner notes if they are available. The screenshot above shows some text I copied from the album’s Wikipedia entry. In any case, I know that if an album has any info it’ll be in track 1’s Lyrics.

But a track’s Show Info displays a modal window which prevents doing anything else with the Music app while it’s open. So I use Lyrics Tag Viewer to display the lyrics or liner notes or what have you while an album is playing but without blocking access to Music.

Latest version:

• Minor UI updates and maintenance

More information for Lyrics Tag Viewer v1.2 and download link is here.

UPDATED: Show Me the Track Info v1.1

This script will display track info from the playing or selected track in a floating window that can be configured to show the information in a user-configured order. Eight sections within the window can be drag-arranged into their order of importance. The window can then re-sized to only display as much of the information as is necessary. Handy for quickly surveying tracks without having to click-click-click for the Music app’s “Info Window”.

Latest version:

• Adds guides to sections
• Minor UI adjustments
• Improved info gathering
• Setting to enable/disable clickable section to reveal file

More information for Show Me the Track Info v1.1 and download link is here.

NEW: Who Da Album Artist v1.0

As you likely know, individual music tracks can each have their own individual artist tag. But there are situations when a single mega-artist is handy-like-a-handle for an album of tracks. Like “Various Artists” for compilation albums or “Ray Charles” if it’s Ray with different artists on each track. That’s why our Founding Fathers created the album artist tag.

Every discreet album in your collection should have an associated “album artist”. It’s what you’d see as the display artist on the cover or spine of a physical album, for example. Here in the digital future, where albums have been disintegrated into tracks, there is no “album”; the “album” information is born by the tracks it “contains” so the tracks can be re-integrated as an “album” in yer third-party devices there. Thus, the album artist tag is more like an “album tag”, rather than a “track tag”. Each track of an album should have the same text in its album artist tag. In fact, having mixed text in an album’s tracks’ album artist tags completely neutralizes the purpose of the mononymnic album artist tag. And some screwing up your music library royally is also nominally possible.

I thought I had album artist configurations handily and dandily in hand over the years. So I was recently in mid-to-high dudgeon after noticing a bunch of albums whose tracks had incorrect or inconsistent or missing album artist tags. CHAAAArrrristopher Columbus! Like I really wanna spend a lot of time going through my library looking for albums with problem album artist tags. So instead I spent what probably would have been the same amount of time making an app that would do the album artist wrangling for me.

Who Da Album Artist will scan your Music library and if it finds any album whose tracks’ album artist tags are missing or inconsistent (more than one per album, for example), will give you the opportunity to enter the appropriate album artist and sort album artist tags.

Latest version:

• Initial release

More information for Who Da Album Artist v1.0 and download link is here.