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Karaoke / Synced Lyrics

When a track has synced lyrics (timestamped line-by-line lyrics embedded in the file), Homecrate can display them as a karaoke overlay on the album artwork — with word-by-word highlighting that tracks the music in real time.

The Mic Button

The 🎤 Mic icon appears in the action button row on the Now Playing screen only when the current track has synced lyrics. If you don’t see it, the track either has no lyrics or has plain (non-timestamped) lyrics only.

[SCREENSHOT: Mic button visible in action row]

Tap it to enable the karaoke overlay. Tap again to close it.

The Karaoke Overlay

[SCREENSHOT: Karaoke overlay on artwork — active line highlighted, surrounding lines dimmed]

The overlay appears directly over the album artwork. It shows:

  • Upcoming lines — displayed in a dim grey
  • The active line — larger, brighter, with word-by-word highlighting
  • Past lines — dimmed further to grey

The overlay animates with a spring effect to keep the active line centered. As time advances, the next line slides into center position.

Word Highlighting

Within the active line, each word fades from dim to bright as it’s “sung”. The timing uses a weighted system — content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) take proportionally longer than function words (articles, prepositions, conjunctions). This makes the highlight feel more musical and less mechanical.

The highlight also advances slightly ahead of the actual timestamp (by about 0.3 seconds) to feel predictive rather than lagging.

The Lyrics Panel (Non-Karaoke View)

Synced lyrics also appear in the Track Info Panel below the separator line, in a scrollable non-karaoke format.

[SCREENSHOT: Synced lyrics in the metadata panel — scrollable, active line bright]

In this view:

  • The active line is highlighted in white
  • Past lines fade to a lighter grey
  • The view auto-scrolls to keep the active line in view
  • You can scroll manually — auto-scroll resumes after 4 seconds of inactivity

Plain Lyrics

If a track has plain (non-timestamped) lyrics, they appear in the Track Info Panel as static text. The Mic button does not appear for plain lyrics — karaoke mode requires timestamps.

Synced Lyrics Format

Homecrate supports the standard LRC format — lyrics with millisecond timestamps embedded in the audio file’s tag fields, formatted as:

[00:12.50] First line of the song
[00:16.80] Second line begins here

Most losslessly ripped FLAC files and many MP3s downloaded from music stores include LRC-format synced lyrics. You can also embed them manually using a tag editor.