Lyrical-rs ♪

A little Rust program that fetches plaintext lyrics from genius.com and dumps them to the terminal, potential successor of https://github.com/raymon-roos/lyrical-php.

Back when I used to use foobar2000, (in a deep, dark past where I used Windows...), I loved having a lyrics panel plugin. Lyrics are a large part of what I enjoy in songs.

My music player of choice these days is cmus. I haven't found a convenient lyrics program that runs in the terminal yet, so I made my own. Though as yet its features are limited.

Dependencies

• Rust & cargo, v1.83
• OpenSSL with headers are required on linux¹ (they're already included in the Nix shell).
• Crates used: reqwest for sending HTTP requests, serde_json for de-serialising JSON, scraper for parsing HTML.

Instructions

Create an API client token

1. Create a genius account.
2. Create an API client: https://genius.com/api-clients. Just fill in some random things, it doesn't matter for this program.
3. Generate an access token for your "client" and save it to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lyrical/token. Maybe make the file only readable and writeable by your own user.

Run on Nix:

Try out without installing:

nix run 'github:raymon-roos/lyrical-rs' 'windmills' 'true natural'
#                                        ^ artist    ^ song title

Install into home-manager or system configuration using flakes:

# flake.nix:
inputs = {
  lyrical.url = "github:raymon-roos/lyrical-rs";
  lyrical.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
}

# home-manager configuration:
home.packages = [
    inputs.lyrical.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
];

# Alternatively, NixOS system configuration:
environment = {
  systemPackages = [
    inputs.lyrical.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
  ];

Installation on Linux:

1. Clone this repo to a location of your choice.
2. Make sure you have the OpenSSL headers installed, as per ¹
3. Run cargo install --path . (make sure that $CARGO_HOME/bin is in your $PATH)

# First argument is the artist's name, second argument is the song title.
# Both are required.
lyrical-rs 'Windmills' 'True Natural'

I use a bash script to get the currently playing song in cmus and to save the lyrics to a file. For inspiration, see https://github.com/raymon-roos/scripts/blob/main/lyrics_in_terminal.sh. That way I can use fd for searching files, rather than implementing my own file searching algorithm. This whole thing could be a bash script, if you can find a good way to parse HTML…

Eventual goals

Eventually I might combine multiple sources for lyrics, support multiple music players, add time cues (karaoke mode), and make the program interactive to allow for more advanced features. We'll see…

Footnotes

1. https://crates.io/crates/reqwest ↩ ↩²