Lyrimuse

Desktop lyrics, reimagined for the Mac.

Language / 语言 / 語言: English | 简体中文 | 繁體中文

!Platform !Architecture

Coming from LyricsX? It hasn't had a new release since April 2022. Lyrimuse covers what it did, keeps getting updates, and adds support for Chinese-language players, KKBOX, Amazon Music and web players. For the details, see the fact-checked comparison with LyricsX and Lyric Fever.

Install with Homebrew, on Apple Silicon or Intel. It also clears the first-launch Gatekeeper warning for you. Prefer to download it yourself? Grab the latest release and see Getting Started.

brew tap yudaotor/lyrimuse
brew trust --cask yudaotor/lyrimuse/lyrimuse   # one-time: Homebrew asks you to trust non-official taps
brew install --cask lyrimuse

_{Four ways to show lyrics: the Lyrics Window, the Dynamic-Island-style capsule, the floating overlay with word-by-word highlight, and the menu bar}

_{Lyrics Manager, manual search with a score on every result, and the panel that shows why a song got the lyrics it got}

_{Your Last.fm numbers and charts, the overview you see when nothing's playing, and a GitHub-style heatmap of your year}

_{Every settings page has a live preview, you can pick more than one player (web players too), and the menu bar dropdown has the rest}

Features

Word-by-word synced lyrics, matched automatically

• Word-by-word highlighting that keeps up with the song as it plays.
• Twelve lyrics sources, searched for you: NetEase Cloud Music, QQ Music, Kugou, Kuwo, Migu, Musixmatch, LRCLIB, LyricFind (through YouTube Music), Deezer, AMLL (a hand-curated word-by-word lyrics database), Soda Music (its own word-by-word timing), and Apple Music's lyrics if you connect your account in Settings. Apple Music is the only official source of the bunch, and many of its tracks have word timing. You never have to search yourself.
• Translation and romanization under the original lyrics. If the source has a community translation, you get that. If not, your Mac translates the lyrics with Apple's Translation framework, so they never leave your computer, and an online translator steps in when that can't. There are 17 target languages. Romanization is decided line by line: a Chinese song with one Japanese line gets a reading on that line only, not pinyin all over the rest. Cantonese songs get Jyutping that understands whole words.
• Duets split by singer. When the source (or an AMLL entry) marks who sings which line, each part is shown on its own instead of two voices mashed into one block.
• The Apple Music touches in the Lyrics Window: background vocals on their own line under the main one, overlapping duet lines lit up together until both finish, and long held English words that swell and glow the way Apple Music does it.
• Simplified or Traditional Chinese for the lyrics, set separately from the app's own language.
• Lyrics Manager, for when you want to tidy up. Browse, edit, delete or search again for any song, delete many at once, and resize the columns. If one song's timing is off, shift just that song. One button retries every song that still has no lyrics, and a full rescan re-picks your whole library with the current matching rules. Anything you fixed by hand is left alone.
• Works offline for any song whose lyrics are already cached.

Last.fm listening profile and scrobbling

• A full listening profile. Connect Last.fm in one click from the Accounts section (no token to copy and paste) and you get today, last-7-days and all-time totals, a live "now scrobbling" indicator, and your recent plays with covers, each with a heart for loving it (or taking the love back) on Last.fm. By default each play is sent as the matching track in Last.fm's catalogue, so duet credits, Simplified / Traditional spellings and tails like " - Single" or "(Remastered)" land on the real track page; switch to Raw in Settings to send exactly what the player reported. ListenBrainz always gets the original tags (how scrobbling works).
• Top artists, albums and tracks for the last 7 days, 30 days, year or all time, each with how far it moved since the previous period. Click an artist to see the songs of theirs you play most.
• Footprint, a tab of its own. It opens with your running totals: how many days since your first scrobble, how many of them had plays and the daily average, your biggest day, your current and longest streak, this year so far against the same stretch of an earlier year, and how far you are from the next round-number milestone. Below that come a GitHub-style heatmap of the year, when you listen by hour and weekday, where your top artists are from, and "On This Day", with what you played on this date in years past.
• Every play is saved on your Mac first, even before you connect Last.fm. Connect later and it catches up on everything in between.
• You decide when a play counts: at 50% like Last.fm's default, at 75% or 90%, or only when the song actually finishes. ListenBrainz isn't affected. You can also keep a player out of Last.fm completely, so its plays never show up in your history.
• The same history shows up in the Lyrics Window when nothing's playing, so you get an overview instead of a blank screen (more on that below).

Floating overlay, menu bar lyrics, Dynamic Island, or a full lyrics window

• Use several players, or let it pick. Apple Music and Spotify are read with Automation access. QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, Kugou Music, Soda Music, KKBOX and Amazon Music are read through macOS's MediaRemote and need no permission. Turn on any mix in Settings, or leave it on auto-detect and it follows whatever macOS shows as Now Playing.
• Apple Music radio works too. The lyrics keep up with each song on a station. While the host is talking you see the station's name and logo, not the song before. Radio gets its own timing offset, so you can fix a station once and forget about it.
• So do players in your browser. Pair your browser once and YouTube Music or Spotify Web works like any other player, with lyrics synced to the page's own progress bar. A one-click test tells you up front whether the browser can be controlled at all. During an ad the capsule turns black and shows how long is left and which ad of how many this is. YouTube Music ads get a skip button, or can be skipped automatically.
• Pick how you want to see it, any combination or none at all:

• Menu bar lyrics (text mode). The current line sits right in the menu bar. Long lines scroll instead of getting cut off halfway (you can switch back to cutting them off). A second row can show the next line, the translation or the romanization, and the capsule can do the same.
• Drag the progress bar to seek, in the Lyrics Window and in the capsule.
• Open the song where it lives from the "⋯" menu or the info panel. Apple Music opens in the app, Spotify jumps to the track that's playing, and QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music open the song, album or artist page on the web. Lyrimuse found the link while fetching lyrics, so there's nothing to search.
• When nothing's playing, the Lyrics Window shows today's and this week's totals, an "On This Day" card, and your recent plays with covers, each one linking to its album or artist page in Apple Music.
• A mini Lyrics Window: a small card with the current and next line, compact or multi-line, with its own background, text color and font.
• Album notes and artist bios. Click the artist or album name in the Lyrics Window or the expanded capsule to read about them, from Apple Music, or from Last.fm when Apple Music has nothing.
• Make it look the way you like: the font (the system one, or your own .ttf / .otf files), size, text / background / shadow colors, saved themes or a color taken from the current album art, and the overlay's width.
• Hidden in screenshots, recordings and screen shares. You still see it. Nobody else does.
• Hides itself when you pause, so it isn't sitting on your desktop doing nothing.

Everyday details

• Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English, and switching takes effect right away, no restart.
• Keyboard shortcuts for every action. None are set out of the box, so you pick the keys.
• Search in Settings. Type in the sidebar and it scrolls to the matching row and highlights it, opening a collapsed group if it needs to.
• Updates itself. It checks on its own, or when you ask from the menu bar. Updates install from the Software Update page in Settings, with the release notes and progress right there, and you can opt in to beta builds.
• Start together with your players, set per player and in either direction: open them when Lyrimuse opens, open Lyrimuse when they open, and if you like, quit Lyrimuse once all the players it follows have quit.
• Moving to a new Mac? Export your whole setup and import it there. If something goes wrong, there's also a one-click diagnostics export.

Optional extras

Getting Started

Releases are signed with the project's own certificate, not an Apple Developer ID, so none of the options below involve an Apple Developer account. The catch is that the first time you open the app, Gatekeeper says it's "from an unidentified developer". Homebrew (Option A) clears that for you. With the other options it's expected, not a bug, and Option B shows how to get past it once.

Option 0: Hand the install to an AI

Running an AI agent that can use the terminal on your Mac (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, …)? Paste the block below into it as-is, and it will do everything in Options A/B for you. The instructions only let it install this one app. It won't use sudo or touch system-wide security settings:

Please install Lyrimuse — an open-source macOS menu-bar lyrics app
(https://github.com/Yudaotor/lyrimuse) — on this Mac, following these rules exactly:
Preferred path (if brew exists):
     brew tap yudaotor/lyrimuse
     brew trust --cask yudaotor/lyrimuse/lyrimuse
     brew install --cask lyrimuse
   If this Homebrew doesn't know the trust subcommand, skip that line — older
   versions don't need it.
If Homebrew is not installed, do NOT install Homebrew. Instead: check the CPU
   with uname -m, download the latest release asset from
   https://github.com/Yudaotor/lyrimuse/releases — Lyrimuse-v<version>-macos.zip
   for arm64, Lyrimuse-v<version>-macos-intel.zip for x86_64 — verify it against
   its .sha256 file (shasum -c), unzip, move Lyrimuse.app into
   /Applications, then clear the Gatekeeper quarantine flag on that one app only:
     xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Lyrimuse.app
Safety rails: no sudo anywhere (nothing here needs it); never run
   spctl --master-disable or otherwise weaken Gatekeeper system-wide; never
   remove the quarantine flag from anything except /Applications/Lyrimuse.app.
Do not build from source unless I explicitly ask.
Launch it (open -a Lyrimuse) and verify it is running (pgrep -x Lyrimuse
   prints a PID).
A first-run wizard will appear — that part is mine to click through. Tell me
   it will ask me to pick a music player, to grant Automation access to
   Music.app and/or Spotify (only if I pick them), and to enable the background
   collector service — then hand control back to me.
Finally, report what you did and anything that failed.

Option A: Install via Homebrew (recommended)

brew tap yudaotor/lyrimuse
brew trust --cask yudaotor/lyrimuse/lyrimuse   # one-time: Homebrew asks you to trust non-official taps
brew install --cask lyrimuse

This clears the one-time Gatekeeper quarantine automatically as part of installing, so there's no follow-up step. Open Lyrimuse from /Applications (or Spotlight) right after brew install finishes. brew upgrade --cask lyrimuse picks up new releases the same way.

Option B: Download a pre-built release manually

1. Grab it from the Releases page. Check which Mac you have first ( → About This Mac → "Chip": Apple M… is Apple Silicon, Intel Core… is Intel):

With the dmg, double-click to mount and drag Lyrimuse.app onto the Applications shortcut next to it; with the zip, unzip and drag Lyrimuse.app into /Applications. Both formats install exactly the same app, and the zip comes with a .sha256 if you want to verify the download (shasum -c Lyrimuse-*.zip.sha256 from the same folder).

The only difference between the two downloads is architecture: the one without a suffix is Apple Silicon only, while -intel carries both Intel and Apple Silicon code. -intel does run on Apple Silicon, but there's no reason to use it there: it's twice the size, and macOS 27 and later will warn that the app "needs to be updated" because it contains Intel code (Apple is removing Rosetta in macOS 28; nothing is actually wrong with the app).

Both architectures get in-app auto-updates. The feed lists two entries for the same version, one per architecture: Apple Silicon is served the unsuffixed build, Intel is served the -intel one, and Sparkle picks per machine on its own. (v1.4.0 and earlier served Apple Silicon only; Intel users had to come back here by hand.)

1. On first launch, macOS will refuse to open it, with "Lyrimuse can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software" or "is from an unidentified developer." Clear it once, with whichever of these you're more comfortable with:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Lyrimuse.app

Only do this for a build you actually trust: the one from this repo's Releases page, or one you built yourself.

Option C: Build from source

One-time prerequisites (skip anything you already have):

xcode-select --install   # Xcode Command Line Tools, for Swift — skip if swift --version already works
brew install go          # any Go ≥ 1.21 — build.sh switches to 1.24.4 automatically via GOTOOLCHAIN

Then build.sh builds both the app and its lyrics engine (the background process named collector) in one shot:

git clone https://github.com/Yudaotor/lyrimuse.git
cd lyrimuse/lyrimuse
./build.sh              # this machine's architecture
./build.sh --universal  # arm64 + x86_64 (the compatibility build shipped for Intel)

build.sh ends by listing the architectures of every binary in the bundle and flags anything that doesn't match the target, whether a slice is missing or there's an extra one. Don't assemble release assets by hand: ./package.sh builds each architecture once and produces a zip + sha256 + dmg for each, refusing to package if the architectures are wrong.

QQ Music / NetEase Cloud Music / Kugou Music / Soda Music / KKBOX / Amazon Music / Spotify / auto-detect support additionally needs ungive/media-control. build.sh installs it via Homebrew automatically if it's missing, so this isn't a step you need to do yourself either.

After any option

Open Lyrimuse from /Applications. The first-run wizard walks you through picking a player (Apple Music, QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, Kugou Music, Soda Music, KKBOX, Amazon Music, Spotify, or auto-detect), granting Automation access if you picked Apple Music or Spotify (the others need no extra permission), and enabling its lyrics engine (so lyrics/artwork keep resolving even when the window's closed). Complete the wizard and lyrics will appear right away (see lyrimuse/README.md for more build options).

That's all you need for lyrics. The optional extras can be set up later from Settings, whenever you want them.

FAQ

How do I get floating Apple Music lyrics on my Mac desktop, always on top?

Can I show Spotify lyrics in the Mac menu bar?

Does it show word-by-word lyrics for QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, Kugou or Soda Music?

Do I need an Apple Developer account to install this?

Is Lyrimuse on the Mac App Store?

Is Lyrimuse free?

Does it work with Spotify, QQ Music, or NetEase Cloud Music, or only Apple Music?

Can I show KKBOX or Amazon Music lyrics on my Mac?

What do the desktop lyrics look like?

Does the Dynamic Island capsule work on a Mac without a notch?

Will lyrics work without an internet connection?

Does any of my data leave my Mac?

Can I get Japanese/Korean romanization or Chinese translation of the lyrics?

Which macOS versions does it support?

Does it support Intel Macs?

Can it show lyrics for YouTube Music or Spotify playing in a browser?

Can it scrobble Apple Music to Last.fm on a Mac?

How does Lyrimuse avoid picking the wrong lyrics?

What if the lyrics are out of sync or wrong?

Can I save the lyrics as .lrc files?

Is LyricsX still maintained, and how is Lyrimuse different from LyricsX or Lyric Fever?

License and Copyright

• Lyrimuse itself is GPL-3.0. The open-source components and dictionary data shipped inside the app (media-control, Sparkle, KeyboardShortcuts, and the OpenCC and rime-cantonese dictionaries) keep their own licenses; the full texts are in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES, which is also bundled into the app and can be opened from Settings → About → Third-party licenses.
• Lyrics, artwork and track metadata belong to their respective rights holders. Lyrimuse only looks them up, caches them and displays them: whatever the public lyric APIs return is stored on your own Mac (~/.config/lyrimuse/) for your own viewing. It does not host, relay or redistribute lyrics or artwork, and the cache can be deleted at any time from Lyrics Manager or by removing that folder.
• Lyrimuse is an independent open-source project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Apple, Tencent (QQ Music), NetEase (NetEase Cloud Music), Kugou, Kuwo, Douyin (Soda Music), KKBOX, Amazon (Amazon Music), China Mobile (Migu Music), Spotify, Google (YouTube Music, Google Translate), Last.fm, ListenBrainz, MusicBrainz, Musixmatch, LRCLIB, LyricFind, Deezer, AMLL or SponsorBlock. Their names and trademarks belong to their owners and appear here only to say which players, lyric sources and services are involved.
• This is everything that leaves your Mac. Lyrics resolution sends the track's artist, title and album (plus the duration, for sources that accept it) to the twelve lyric sources above; when none of them matches, the artist name is also sent to MusicBrainz for alias lookup (Last.fm's Smart matching does the same for artists it hasn't seen before), and the charts look up their artists there by MusicBrainz ID for country/region and links. Cover art and the idle page send artist + title to the iTunes Search API. Album notes and artist bios request the album's and artist's public Apple Music pages by their Apple Music IDs — no Apple account involved. The machine-translation fallback (off by default, and used only when on-device Apple translation is unavailable) sends the lyric text itself, in chunks, to Google's web translation endpoint first and whatever is still untranslated to MyMemory; the MyMemory request carries a randomly generated e-mail parameter — never yours. While a music video plays in YouTube Music, the first four characters of the video ID's SHA-256 hash go to SponsorBlock to find the video's non-music segments so the lyrics line up with the picture; SponsorBlock can't tell from that which video it is. Musixmatch's domain is resolved over DNS-over-HTTPS via Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and Google (8.8.8.8). The About page asks the GitHub API for the star count at most once every six hours, and, if you opt into beta updates, for the release list at most once an hour; update checks fetch the appcast from GitHub Releases and send no system profile. Beyond that, only the services you connect yourself: Last.fm, ListenBrainz, push-notification platforms, the optional web relay (whose Top-10 artists page looks up artist avatars on Deezer). Every outbound request is written to a local audit log — host and operation only, never parameters or credentials — which "Export diagnostics" includes.

Troubleshooting

If lyrics don't show up, open Lyrics Sources in Settings and click Test to see which source can't be reached. If that doesn't sort it out, use Export Diagnostics and attach the file to an issue; it already includes the full self-check of the background service.

/Applications/Lyrimuse.app/Contents/Resources/collector healthcheck
/Applications/Lyrimuse.app/Contents/Resources/collector healthcheck -local-only  # no network
/Applications/Lyrimuse.app/Contents/Resources/collector healthcheck -json

Uninstalling

Dragging Lyrimuse.app to the Trash is not enough. The lyrics engine (process name collector) is registered with launchd as a KeepAlive job, so its LaunchAgent stays behind and launchd keeps trying to start a binary that is no longer there.

lyrimuse/scripts/uninstall.sh              # report only — shows what is installed
lyrimuse/scripts/uninstall.sh --services   # unregister both launchd jobs, keep your data
lyrimuse/scripts/uninstall.sh --purge      # also delete config, caches, logs and settings

Running it with no arguments changes nothing; it just tells you what is on your system. --purge lists everything it is about to delete, warns you how many exported lyrics files are among them, and requires you to type yes.

--services leaves your settings alone. --purge also removes them (defaults delete me.yudaotor.lyrimuse), because leaving them behind puts a reinstall into a dead end: the LaunchAgent is gone, so the collector is not installed, but the app still thinks onboarding is done — so the wizard that would install it never appears, and the desktop just sits at "searching for lyrics".

Project Layout

This repo is the app:

• lyrimuse/ — the app itself (Swift, SwiftUI + AppKit)
• lyrimuse-collector/ — the background engine that resolves lyrics/artwork and feeds them to the app (Go); built and bundled into the app automatically

this repo (app + collector)  ──push──▶  nowplaying-workers (relay)  ◀──read──  nowplaying (web page)

Credits

Thanks to LyricsX, which showed what desktop lyrics on the Mac could be.

License texts are in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.