Author Topic: MARKDOWN support for lyrics  (Read 1900 times)

Kasionz

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Reposting this post as advised since it hasn't been updated in at least 120 days per forum guide. (https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=31708.msg175402#msg175402)

A lot of girl group songs have verses/choruses where one member is singing and this is almost essential esp. if the song ft. other artists, would LOVE this feature added:


Would be amazing if the 'Lyrics' panel could support markdown. When pulling from Genius Lyrics if there are multiple artists on a certain part, the second/third/etc artist's lyrics go to italics/underline/bold/etc. This would be nice to actually see that on MusicBee.


Compared to what it is currently:


Thanks.

Kasionz

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Any comment on whether this has been considered or is at all likely to be implemented?

sveakul

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Remembering that the decription/markdown must actually appear in what was submitted to Genius, using the Beenius plugin will show it, but be sure that the setting "removeTags": in beenius.conf is set to "false."

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=36605.msg214114#msg214114

Whether the display panel can handle all the fonts conventions I don't know.

Kasionz

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Remembering that the decription/markdown must actually appear in what was submitted to Genius, using the Beenius plugin will show it, but be sure that the setting "removeTags": in beenius.conf is set to "false."

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=36605.msg214114#msg214114

Whether the display panel can handle all the fonts conventions I don't know.
It doesn't appear too  :(

slonopot

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Remembering that the decription/markdown must actually appear in what was submitted to Genius, using the Beenius plugin will show it, but be sure that the setting "removeTags": in beenius.conf is set to "false."

In Beenius tags are lines with square brackets that distinguish paragraphs and act like headers, not the markdown. Genius can return lyrics in different formats: dom tree (default), HTML or plain text. Since reading docs first is not an option, I've been parsing just dom and ignoring formatting tags.

Regarding the OP's request, there's no point to make it a built-in feature since MusicBee will be the only software capable of rendering markdown lyrics. It won't cause visual issues unless you export the tracks to any other software, hifi players included. Once these lyrics are open there, you'll see a beautiful unreadable mixture of text, asterisks, underscores and other markdown elements.

Since the request is Genius-related and Steven is not really interested in extending the lyrics API (and it's obvious, it just works), my proposition is that we need Beenius Ultimate that will not be just a lyrics provider but will substitute/extend the lyrics lookup subsystem completely: the plugin will have a distinct lyrics panel with a custom renderer capable of handling markdown, a lyrics lookup core that will get invoked on track changes and lookup lyrics to later convert dom to markdown and save these to a custom tag in a markdown format and in plain format to the default lyrics tag. The lyrics panel should be able to load the formatted lyrics from the markdown tag and use the default one as a fallback.

Complications are:
1. API is not documented, someone will have to take time and thoroughly test this stuff until (and if) it works. We also expect users with custom themes and the panel should look accordingly.
2. Lyrics should be editable, this will need to be cleared of markdown before syncing back to plain lyrics.
3. Some tracks already have lyrics, including already manually edited. This will either remain a fallback and only markdown lyrics will need to be synced or these will have to be cleared.
4. No other providers except Genius care about formatting. I don't expect Genius to limit their API, but there were complaints from dudes who don't understand that Genius was called Rap Genius back in the day and try to query my dude Giuseppe Verdi expecting a ghetto wiki to be conversant in 19th century.

The project looks interesting in terms of deep MusicBee tweaking and might work as a customization example, but the expected user count is minimal. I mean, I have around 3.1k Beenius "downloads" from getmusicbee.com plugin catalogue and it's a main source of traffic according to Github stats. Beenius doesn't have any UI at all since it's all about the main function to configure once and forget about it forever. This thing will need to do more than that and I have zero idea about the number of user interfaces required to make a proper lyrics engine replacement/extension.

As for me, it's an overkill feature and I have no immediate interest in making this a reality. We can run a poll on Github or in the Beenius thread to see the possible userbase and maybe one day someone will have nothing to do and consider making a banger.
Last Edit: August 05, 2023, 03:33:58 AM by slonopot