I was always frustrated that there is no solid source for synced lyrics that also offers decent API support. There is good ol' Crintsoft's MiniLyrics that is thankfully free software, was what I used a lot in my childhood, but unfortunately the API is highly obfuscated. Another popular choice is the Musixmatch API, which has a very large database of synced lyrics, but with "free" API that are reverse-engineered from their app, you will quickly run into rate-limit.

That's why I created LRCLIB. It's aimed to provide completely free synchronized lyrics for everyone, especially for FOSS music players, with zero profit intention. It currently has nearly 3,000,000 (not deduplicated) lyrics in database. You can also contribute to the database by adding and syncing lyrics for your favorite songs using the LRCGET client.

I'm trying my best to make LRCLIB server-side code open-source as soon as possible. But right now, full LRCLIB's database dumps have already been uploaded regularly and publicly, which are simply sqlite3 files. Feel free to download, look at or do anything you want with the database at https://lrclib.net/db-dumps.

Many open-source projects have already begun integrating LRCLIB, including:

- beets - music library metadata management (https://github.com/beetbox/beets) - feishin - self-hosted music player (https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin) - namida - music player for Android (https://github.com/namidaco/namida)

If you are interested or are looking for a good API for unsynced/synced lyrics source, please check it out!