Play a song/audiobook in iTunes/Music on Mac, and use LyricStamp to:

• Fetch plain text lyrics/scripts from the Internet, or a local .txt file, or the clipboard
• Add timestamps to the plain text lyrics by playing a keyboard game alongside (think lip-sync)
• Add optional (context-based) phonetics automatically
  • Romaji for Japanese
  • Jyutping for Cantonese
  • Pinyin for Mandarin
• Add optional (multi-language, i.e., one-to-many) translations automatically

This produces a .lrcx to be used in tandem with LyricsX for synchronized lyrics/scripts display. (And why do we want synchronization in the first place? To 🎙️Karaoke🥳! And also to learn languages; e.g., to read along while listening and to precisely one-click jump to lines for repetition/reinforcement.)

Usage:

Run python lyricstamp.py to call out the 'game' interface, and follow the on-screen instructions. Here's a small demo. When the last line is reached, press 'Enter' to end stamping, and save a media_title - artist.lrcx file to your LyricsX folder (where the media_title and artist are extracted from Music's now playing track properties via AppleScript). Enjoy!

Motivation:

• LyricsX works wonders with Apple Music, especially for songs with no built-in synchronized lyrics. However, LyricsX relies on *.lrcx searched and fetched from a few Asia-based web services, and understandably, supply for songs in other languages or indie/obscure songs are scarce. And while plain-text lyrics are abundant online, time-stamping solutions I've found (e.g. NLP-based, iMovie timeline adjustment) are either an overkill or a hassle.
• Audiobooks (particularly those targeted at language learning) can benefit greatly from having synchronized listening/reading too. These audiobooks often do come with an accompanying .pdf or .epub for the scripts, which can be easily turned into .txt, but time-stamping is still a hassle. (Fwiw, my limited research had led me to the so-called 'forced alignment', a sound-wave-analysis-based technique to align texts and audio. Not sure if/how well it can handle multi-language in a single file though.)