Unsynchronized lyrics
Unsynchronized lyrics store readable song text without timestamps that align its lines or words to playback.
Unsynchronized lyrics are readable words without an accompanying performance timeline. They can be shown as a verse or full song text while the audio plays, but the data does not say when a particular line is sung.
For a fictional song, the text might be:
River lights
Carry us home
Lift the sail
Into the morning
The four lines have an order and line breaks. They have no timestamps. A reader can scroll through them; a player cannot derive dependable word highlighting merely by knowing the song's duration.
Where the text lives
| Representation | Relationship to the media |
|---|---|
| Text sidecar | Separate file associated with a track |
| ID3 USLT frame | Text embedded in an audio tag |
| Another format's lyrics field | A format-specific embedded description |
| Text painted into a video | Pixels in the audiovisual presentation |
The ID3 USLT frame can qualify text with a language and content descriptor. That allows distinct text entries without pretending they are a timed sequence. The format's encoding also matters for accented or non-Latin characters.
Emby's Music Lyrics documentation describes displaying supplied sidecar lyrics. That is a natural use for untimed text: adding a readable companion does not require modifying the actual song audio.
The text should match what is sung
A translated text, a studio verse and a live performance's changed verse can all be useful, but they describe different content. Their labels should preserve that distinction.
Correcting a spelling error changes the lyric text. Adding timestamps changes its representation into synchronized lyrics. Rewriting the audio is another operation entirely.
For the original verse above, timing begins only when someone supplies evidence such as “River lights starts at 12.40 seconds.” The line breaks themselves never contained that fact.