Sing-Along is a free, open-source desktop music player with synced lyrics for music you already own. It plays your local files, downloads matching lyrics, lets you fix the timing, and exports those lyrics in the formats your phone and car actually understand.
It is built with Tauri v2 (Rust + Vue 3), runs on Linux, Windows and macOS, and is
licensed MIT. llms.txt summarises the project for AI agents.
- What it does: batch-downloads synced lyrics, edits line- and word-level timing, converts between Simplified and Traditional Chinese, exports to LRC, enhanced LRC (A2) and TTML
- Lyric sources: LRCLIB (primary) and NetEase (optional fallback)
- Platform: Linux
.deb, amd64 - Not a music manager: no streaming, no metadata scraping, no library curation beyond a play queue
- Free: no subscription, no paid tier, MIT licensed
Sing-Along scans the folders you choose and saves lyrics next to your audio files or embeds them in the tags. It began as a fork of LRCGET and has since diverged — see Independent project.
Find lyrics for a whole library. Batch download with skip rules — overwrite everything, fill only tracks missing synced lyrics, or only tracks with no lyrics at all — chosen per download rather than as a global setting.
Sync a single track. Every row in the library has a sync button that runs the same pipeline for one song, so a fix does not mean re-downloading an album.
Fix timings by ear. Play a track and correct it line by line, or word by word. A keyboard shortcut stamps a line with the current playback position, so the usual loop is: play, hear it drift, press a key.
Convert between Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Conversion is offered at
download time and remembered, because it is lossy in both directions: 发 is
發 (as in 發財) or 髮 (as in 頭髮), and only context decides. Off by default.
Export to what your phone actually reads. The Export menu writes the whole library out as plain text, LRC, enhanced LRC (A2) for Android players, or TTML for iOS players — in any combination — either as sidecar files or embedded into the audio tags.
Fetch missing album art. Optionally searches iTunes and Deezer — both public, no key — and writes the front cover into the audio file's tags. Off by default, because it rewrites your files.
Seventeen UI languages. English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, 한국어, Español, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Português (Brasil), Polski, Türkçe, Русский, Українська, Tiếng Việt, ไทย, Bahasa Indonesia — following the system language by default, switching live without a restart.
| Source | What it is | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| LRCLIB | Open, community-run lyric database | The default. Instance URL is configurable. |
| NetEase | China's largest music service | Fallback when LRCLIB has nothing. Non-official API — it can break, and a failure just means "no fallback lyrics found" rather than an error. |
The Search tab queries both and tags each result with where it came from. Either source can be unticked; a source that fails does not hide the other's results.
Word-level lyric files are not portable. There are at least eight dialects and only one of them (TTML) is an actual standard:
| Format | Line timing | Word timing | Defined by |
|---|---|---|---|
| LRC | ✅ | ❌ | a 1998 Winamp plug-in, never standardised |
| LRC A2 (Enhanced LRC) | ✅ | ✅ | the A2 Media Player author |
| SPL | ✅ | ✅ | the Salt Player author |
| YRC / QRC / KRC | ✅ | ✅ | NetEase / QQ Music / Kugou (the last two are encrypted) |
| TTML | ✅ | ✅ | W3C (started as DFXP in 2003) |
So the same library has to be exported twice if you use two players: enhanced LRC for players that read the A2 extension (Gramophone, Fluxio), and TTML for players whose word highlighting comes only from TTML (Steve on iOS).
Background, with sources, on how these formats came to exist, who owns each one, why two of them are encrypted, and why free offline players with word-level lyrics are so scarce:
📖 从「能免费在车里唱歌」出发，我为什么会撞上三种歌词格式 (Chinese)
Standalone conversion helpers live in tools/ if you want
them without the app.
vs LRCGET. LRCGET is a mass-downloading utility: it fetches lyrics for a library and stops there. Sing-Along is the same idea plus a player, a word-level timing editor, Chinese script conversion, album art, and export to A2 and TTML. Sing-Along is a fork of LRCGET but does not track it.
vs a general music player (VLC, foobar2000, MusicBee, Strawberry). Those play audio and display whatever lyrics file already exists. Sing-Along's job is producing and correcting that file — downloading it, timing it word by word, converting it, exporting it for a specific player.
vs streaming apps. No account, no network dependency for playback, no catalogue. Your files, your lyrics, offline.
vs buying lyrics. Word-level lyric timing files are not sold anywhere. Every format in the comparison table above is either community-produced or reverse-engineered from one of the Chinese music services.
- People with a local music library (FLAC, MP3, M4A) who want lyrics that scroll, not static text
- Anyone who has tried to get word-by-word lyrics working on a Chinese Android player or an iPhone and found the file format is the problem
- Chinese-language listeners who need Simplified/Traditional conversion, or whose titles and artists are CJK and break naive search
- People syncing a library to a phone or car head unit and needing the lyrics written in a format that device reads
Sing-Along is not tracking upstream. It began as a fork of LRCGET and has since gone its own way — there is no upstream remote, no pull from the original repository, and no intent to push changes back. Bug reports and features are decided here.
That also means a few things you should not expect:
- No parity with LRCGET. Upstream may add features this fork never gets, and the other way round.
- A different scope. LRCGET is a mass-downloading utility. Sing-Along is a player that also edits and converts.
- Upstream issues do not apply here. If you hit something, report it in this repository.
The same binary runs headless. sing-along with no arguments opens the player;
a subcommand does the work without a window:
sing-along fetch ~/Music # download missing lyrics
sing-along fetch ~/Music --script simplified
sing-along export ~/Music --for steve # TTML for iOS
sing-along export ~/Music --for gramophone # enhanced LRC for Android
sing-along status ~/Music # what a folder is missing
sing-along formats # list export targetsThis is the same binary you installed: run it with no arguments and the player opens, add a subcommand and it works headless.
For a machine where the player cannot be installed — a container, a NAS, a
minimal server — every release also carries a standalone binary. Pick one file,
chmod +x, run it. Nothing else to install:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Linux x86_64 | singalong-cli-linux-amd64 (statically linked) |
| Linux arm64 | singalong-cli-linux-arm64 (statically linked) |
| macOS Apple Silicon | singalong-cli-macos-arm64 |
| Windows x86_64 | singalong-cli-windows-amd64.exe |
curl -LO https://github.com/LeisureLinux/Sing-Along/releases/latest/download/singalong-cli-linux-amd64
chmod +x singalong-cli-linux-amd64
./singalong-cli-linux-amd64 status ~/Musicman sing-along documents all of it, including why the format has to match the
player: Steve on iOS reads word timing
only from TTML, Gramophone and
Fluxio only from enhanced LRC, and sending one to the other shows the timestamps
as lyric text.
The package ships a skill describing the workflow for a coding agent — the questions to settle first, the player-to-format table, how to verify a converted file, and the rules that matter (never rewrite lyric text; do not claim a track can be synced when only unsynchronised text exists).
It is installed at /usr/share/sing-along/skills/sing-along/SKILL.md, and lives
in this repository at skills/sing-along/SKILL.md.
To use it with Claude Code or a similar agent, point the agent at that file, or copy it into the skills directory the agent reads:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/sing-along
cp /usr/share/sing-along/skills/sing-along/SKILL.md ~/.claude/skills/sing-along/Typical requests it covers:
- "Fill in the lyrics for the music files in this folder"
- "Export these lyrics in a format Steve can read"
- "Check what lyrics this folder is missing"
If you are an agent asked to set this up, this is the whole procedure:
1. Download the standalone binary for your platform from the latest release:
Linux x86_64 singalong-cli-linux-amd64 (statically linked)
macOS arm64 singalong-cli-macos-arm64
Windows x86_64 singalong-cli-windows-amd64.exe
Do not download the .deb/.rpm/.AppImage/.dmg/.exe: those are the desktop
player and need a webview installed to run.
2. chmod +x it, and confirm it runs:
./singalong-cli-linux-amd64 --version
3. Read the skill, which explains how to choose the right lyric format:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LeisureLinux/Sing-Along/main/skills/sing-along/SKILL.md
4. Then follow it. The commands are:
<bin> status <dir> what lyrics a folder is missing
<bin> fetch <dir> download the missing ones
<bin> export <dir> --for <player> write them in a player's format
<bin> formats list valid player names
Two rules from the skill that matter most:
- Never translate or rewrite lyric text.
- If fetch reports "no timed lyrics", LRCLIB only has unsynchronised text for
that track. Say so; do not retry.
See the latest release for the current version's files.
Linux — .deb for Debian and Ubuntu, .rpm for Fedora and openSUSE, or the
.AppImage if neither applies. The AppImage needs no installation; mark it
executable and run it.
sudo apt install ./sing-along_x.y.z_amd64.deb # Debian / Ubuntu
sudo dnf install ./sing-along-x.y.z-1.x86_64.rpm # Fedora
chmod +x sing-along_x.y.z_amd64.AppImage && ./sing-along_x.y.z_amd64.AppImageWindows — -setup.exe installs it. It asks whether to install for the
current user (no administrator rights needed) or for all users on the machine.
macOS — the .dmg is Apple Silicon only (M1 and later).
The Linux builds are dynamically linked against WebKitGTK, GTK 3 and ALSA, so they need those present at runtime. A static build is not possible: distributions ship no static WebKitGTK, and WebKitGTK loads GIO modules and font backends at runtime even when everything else is linked in.
The apps are free and built by one person, so the installers are not signed with a paid certificate. Windows and macOS show a warning because of that — not because anything is wrong with the file.
You will see "Windows protected your PC" and a line saying the publisher is unknown.
Click More info, then Run anyway. Windows remembers the choice for that file, so it only asks once.
You will see one of these:
"Sing-Along" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Trash.
"Sing-Along" cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.
The app is fine — macOS says this about any app it has not seen before. The first message is just badly worded.
To open it: go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the Security section, and click Open Anyway next to Sing-Along. Enter your password when asked. You only need to do this once.
If the app really does seem broken after that (it quits immediately, or nothing happens), the download may have arrived damaged. Delete it, download again, and if it still fails open an issue on the repository.
Drag Sing-Along into Applications before opening it — running it from inside
the .dmg does not work properly.
Stack: Tauri v2 — Rust backend, Vue 3 frontend, SQLite.
Two architecture notes are worth reading before changing code:
src/ARCHITECTURE.md for the frontend and
src-tauri/ARCHITECTURE.md for the backend. Both
describe the parts that are not obvious from the file names — the composable
state model, the event flow, the scanner, and the lyric-file formats.
Prerequisites: Rust 1.81+, Node 18+, plus the
Tauri platform prerequisites (on
Linux: libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, libgtk-3-dev, libasound2-dev,
build-essential).
npm install
npm run tauri:devnpm run tauri:dev passes --features dev,devtools. Plain tauri dev only
passes --no-default-features, so a debug build started that way has neither the
devtools panel nor the WebDriver bridge on 127.0.0.1:4445 — this trips people
up.
Before reporting work as done, all three must pass:
npx eslint src --include=*.js --include=*.vue
npx vitest run
cd src-tauri && cargo testBuild note: Charabia's dictionaries are downloaded at build time by its build
scripts. If that fails (network, TLS), point LINDERA_CACHE at a populated cache
directory and the scripts take a fast path instead of downloading.
npm install
npm run tauri buildOutput lands in src-tauri/target/release/ and the bundle in
src-tauri/target/release/bundle/.
Release builds carry no devtools and no WebDriver server: both are behind opt-in
cargo features that tauri build does not enable. Verify with
cargo tree -i tauri-plugin-webdriver, which cannot resolve the package at all
in the default feature set.
bundle.targets in tauri.conf.json lists what a plain npm run tauri build
produces: deb, rpm, appimage, nsis and dmg. Each platform only builds
the ones it can — a Linux run skips the Windows and macOS targets — so the list is
a declaration of intent rather than a single-machine build plan.
msi is deliberately absent. It exists for GPO/Intune deployment, which needs
per-machine installation and therefore administrator rights; the NSIS installer
offers per-user or per-machine at install time and covers both cases.
Sing-Along is a fork of LRCGET, Copyright (c) 2023 tranxuanthang, used under the MIT License. The original copyright notice and the MIT permission notice are retained in LICENSE; see NOTICE for full attribution and a list of what this fork changed. The About dialog in the app carries the same credit.
Sing-Along is free, with no subscription and nothing held back behind a payment. If it earned that, a tip is welcome — not expected.
Thanks for your donation!
感谢您的赞赏！