pearLyrics V0.6.3
©2006 pearworks (Walter Ritter)

Please note that in order to use pearLyrics you already need to have the permission from respective content owners to display and save lyrics to your personal music collection, as pearLyrics in no way will transfer any rights to you.

What it's all about:
Ever wanted to dive into the world of those incredibly beautiful lyrics of the song currently playing in iTunes? pearLyrics gives you just that. It looks up song lyrics on the web as you play songs in iTunes. Sure enough, you can also search for lyrics without playing the song, just enter artist and song title manually. pearLyrics then consults up to seven different servers to do its best and find the lyrics you are looking for. And best of all, you can also tell it to populate the lyrics inside your iTunes Library. Heck, it can even find guitar chords at times. With the standalone app you can also pre-fetch lyrics for whole iTunes playlists so you have them ready when you need them. 

pearLyrics is available as a standalone application as well as a Dashboard widget for Tiger.

System Requirements:
- MacOS X 10.3 or higher for the standalone application
- MacOS X 10.4 or higher for the Dashboard widget

Licence Agreement:
pearLyrics is freeware. You can use it, copy it and give it away as often as you like, actually, the more the better. However, you are not allowed to make any changes to the program itself or any accompanying documentation. The ReadMe-file must always be included in distributed copies!
Please note that you are not allowed to sell pearLyrics - please contact me for a special agreement in such a case.
This software is provided "as is" . Use it at your own risk! I don't take any liability concerning any damages or disappointments caused by the use of this software. By using this software you agree to these terms.

Installation:
Just copy the pearLyrics application anywhere to your harddrive (Applications is probably the best place). 
To install the widget just doubleclick on it. In order to be able to activate it from the widgets bar you should copy the pearLyrics widget either to /Library/Widgets or ~/Library/Widgets (in case the folder does not exist just create it).

To remove both widget and application just move them to trash. Note that the widget does not need the application in order to work.

pearLyrics creates a caching directory to save lyrics in ~/Library/Application Support/pearLyrics. If you've deleted pearLyrics you might also want to remove this cache directory.

How to tell pearLyrics to copy its lyrics into your iTunes Library:
There are two simple steps involved. First you need to make sure you have the option 'Copy lyrics to iTunes' checked. Second you need to have iTunes running while fetching new lyrics. That's it. Note that by default pearLyrics respects whatever the content of your current lyrics settings in iTunes is - it doesn't overwrite anything if there are already lyrics in there. If you also want to update existing lyrics, simple activate the option 'Can overwrite existing lyrics'.

Some hidden Widget functionality:
To copy lyrics from your widget to your clipboard, just click on the lyrics.
To get lyrics for the currently playing track, simply click on the status text at the bottom.
To copy currently cached lyrics to the desktop (i.e. to move them to your iPod), type "copyCacheToDesktop" into the search field and hit return.
To empty the cache simply type "emptyCache" and hit return.

Contact Info:
I'm happy for every feedback I get. So if there's something on your mind, wether you just want to say how insanely great this application is, or what a complete waste of time it was to try it out, let me know. For the rare case you feel the inexplicable need to send me something real (like i.e. a postcard), check out my webpage for the postal address - I'm always curious to see on which parts of the world my apps are used :)

walter@pearworks.com
http://www.pearworks.com

Version History:
V 0.6.3:
- Both: new copyright notification message upon the first launch
- Both: Universal binary for PowerPC and Intel processors
- Both: Updated lyrics site parsers

V 0.6:
- Both: ability to reject found lyrics and continue search
- Both: now supports update of songs playing directly from the iPod
- Both: added various lyrics sites (all in all now 10)
- Both: added option to allow overwriting of existing iTunes lyrics
- Both: added option to delay iTunes update until the end of a song to prevent skipping of playback.
- Both: fine tuned search algorithms for more accurate search results
- Both: fixed issue where lyrics were not copied to iTunes due to encoding issues
- Both: now supports case sensitive file systems
- Both: now avoids updating of read-only songs (avoid jittered playback)
- Both: Google-Search option is now available even if lyrics were found.
- Both: changed the way song lyrics get updated in iTunes. This should fix an issue where lyrics were set for a wrong song.
- Both: fixed issues for songs/artists containing a slash (like AC/DC)
- Both: minor bug fixes
- Widget: clicking on status text get's the currently playing track again
- Widget: slightly adjusted interface
- App: added option to keep window always on top
- App: added option to set transparency level of the window
- App: cleaned up interface and new Preferences section
- App: now remembers the font setting in the window.
- App: added help section
- App: now supports iTunes music libraries in non-default places

V0.5:
- Both: now also looks in iTunes Library for song lyrics if iTunes is running (iTunes 5 or higher)
- Both: option to automatically copy found lyrics into your iTunes Library (iTunes 5 or higher)
- Both: fine tuned search algorithms for more accurate search results
- Both: improved special character handling in search string
- Widget: support for multiple instances with different settings (i.e. one for chords, one for lyrics)
- Widget: new special text command 'copyCacheToITunes' to copy cached lyrics to the iTunes Library
- Widget: option to look up lyrics on Google if no lyrics were found
- Widget: option to refetch lyrics from the web if they were taken from the pearLyrics cache

V0.4:
- Both: new lyrics servers
- Both: much improved and individually optimized search algorithms for the different lyrics sites
- Both: new shared caching option for clear text lyrics
- Both: search field now provides history (widget only captures manually entered tracks)
- Widget: click on contact data now sends feedback email or loads homepage respectively.
- Widget: special text commands to empty cache (emptyCache) and copy fetched lyrics to Desktop (copyCacheToDesktop)
- Application: copy cached lyrics to Desktop for easy access
- Application: pre-fetch lyrics for iTunes playlists
- Application: correct mistakes in found lyrics and save them back to cache

V0.3:
- Widget: slightly enhanced layout (status bar now better distinguishable)
- Widget: added scroll wheel support
- Both: further improved search algorithms 
- Both: added more lyrics servers
- Both: added support for special characters in search string (i.e. umlauts)
- Both: now there is an option to look for guitar chords, and use standard lyrics as fallback
- Application: scrolling position is now reset when a new title is loaded.

V0.2:
- Widget: enhanced layout (easier search, less screen space used, resizable, minimizable)
- Application: lyrics can now be saved to text file
- Both: better result handling for some lyrics websites
- Both: automatic listening to iTunes can now be deactivated
- Both: lyrics for current track of iTunes can now be retrieved manually too

V0.1:
- Initial version supporting four lyrics websites