You may know the lyrics to your favourite songs, but there are probably many you don’t know. Use Apple Music to show all the lyrics to a song and to time-sync them so you can sing along.
It can be frustrating when you want to sing along with a great music track and half way through a line you start mumbling “der d derrrr de dum er…” as you don’t know the rest the of the words. It spoils the fun.
One solution is to find the lyrics to your favorite songs on the web and to learn them off by heart. However, this is not much fun either. It is better to learn as you sing and to have the complete lyrics in front of you as the music is playing. After repeating a song a few times, you will soon remember it.
Better still is to have time-synced lyrics display as the song plays, with each line highlighted at the right moment so you can join in and sing along with your favorite artist.
Apple Music on the Mac can do this and it is great fun. It is even more fun at parties and gatherings of friends where you can have karaoke sessions with people singing along to the top tracks they like.
You might have missed the time-synced lyrics option in the Music app on the Apple Mac, so here is a quick guide and it is really easy to use.
1 Select your music
Select some music to play. This can be a single track, a track in an album or a playlist. I chose Apple Music Pop, a ready-made playlist of the best music. Begin playing from the start or from any track in an album or playlist.
2 Get info on the current track
There is more than one way to get info on the currently playing track and an easy way is to click the three dots to the right of the current track at the top of the window. Click Get Info in the menu that is displayed.
3 See the lyrics to a music track
In the window that opens, select the Lyrics tab to see the lyrics to the whole song. It can be useful for singing along to the music or just for interest or research. It also shows the song writers.
Down at the bottom of the lyrics window are forward and back buttons. These show the lyrics to the next or previous track in an album or playlist, so you can skip forward and see what is coming up.
Occasionally, you will find that there are no lyrics for a song and Apple Music does not know them all, but many popular songs are there, so it is not hard to find your favorites.
The complete lyrics are useful, but there is a better way to show them.
4 Show time-synced music lyrics
Close that info window and return to the main Apple Music window. In the top right corner is what looks like a speech bubble. Click it and a panel opens on the right with time-synced-lyrics.
The line at the top is the one currently being sung and it is highlighted. The lines below automatically scroll up as the song plays. Use the scroll bar to look ahead and see what lines are coming up.
All the lines are clickable and clicking one instantly jumps to that part of the music, so if you have a favorite section, scroll down the lyrics to the line where it starts and click it. If you want to repeat something, scroll back in the lyrics and click the line to jump to it.
The font used is large and this is obviously so you can stand back from the Mac and sing and dance along, perhaps recording yourself at the same time using the Mac’s built in camera TikTok-style. It’s a fun feature, so try it out.
