Is Lyric Snapper the new pearLyrics?

Lyric Snapper is a free iTunes add-on that will locate the lyrics to any song in your playlist. The program essentially searches the web for lyrics to a particular tune and downloads them from available websites while the song is being played. Lyrics are then updated in the song Info within iTunes and saved to your iTunes library.

If you're not excited about the add-on you can also use Lyric Snapper as a program separate from iTunes to search for song lyrics by song title or artist. Lyric Snapper is currently in beta, with its first release a few days ago.

Sound familiar? Lyric Snapper is very similar to pearLyrics a program we covered in 2005. Shortly after being released pearLyrics received a cease-and desist letter from Warner/Chappel music who felt the program infringed on their copyright to the music despite the fact that much like Lyric Snapper it only searched public websites and did the same thing that anyone could do with a normal web browser. pearLyrics -- a small developer -- pulled their app off the market not having the resources to fight a huge company, the EFF stepped in and tried to help the developer ultimately getting Warner to apologize to pearLyrics and agree to work with them, a promise that they never fulfilled.

pearLyrics was Mac only and Lyric Snapper is currently PC only. It will be interesting to see if history repeats itself with Lyric Snapper. Will record companies fight the app or will they make good on their almost 2 year old promise and help these lyrics searchers out. We'll hide and watch, but we won't bother holding our breath.

Tags: itunes, lyric snapper, lyrics, LyricSnapper, music, pearlyrics