I have my music stored in ALAC with artwork and tags.

I have so far stored the lyrics in seperate files, but would prefer to store them in the AAC container.

iTunes will organise files in folders according to their artist and album tags, which I quite like since I saves me for the work.

However iTunes don't know of my lyrics files and they will not be renamed in case artist, album or title tag are updated.

Lyrics are not supported directly by iTunes, but can easily be retreived with other programs, such as metaaac. It will therefore be easier to retreive the lyrics if they are stored in the AAC file.

TGF store lyrics in AAC files using the "lyr" tag.

Do anyone know of a CLI program that can be used for adding a "lyr" tag to AAC files?

That could be a nice feature.
I could import lyrics and pictures from external files just like I export them right now.
If you have a consistent file names and the files reside on a certain path that could be easy to do.

1) itunes uses the container defined in mpeg-4 .mp4/.m4a (iso 14996-14)
2) the mpeg-4 standard defines how to store text streams (eg lyrics) in .mp4/.m4a (iso 14996-17)
3) there is already a tool existing that will allow you to create such text streams: mp4box from the gpac project
read more about the process here

iTunes does know about Lyrics tags now, and they added support for them in the COM SDK.

I wrote a little javascript to retrieve lyrics from an EvilLyrics cache and add them to iTunes files. You can get it here: http://ottodestruct.com/iTunes/EvilLyricsImport.txt

Thanks Otto!

Seems so long since I asked...

However I did a perl script to retrieve lyrics for all selected songs in iTunes, so I already have lyrics for most of my music.

It checks a few of the most popular lyrics sites, including two special sites for Danish artists Shu-bi-dua and Gasolin'.

Your idea of using EvilLyrics to retrieve the lyrics is brilliant, since it's probably the best program for retrieving lyrics.

BTW do you know of a way to have EvilLyrics automatically retrieve lyrics from all songs in iTunes?

The only way I found was to create a small script that list the selected songs in iTunes in play list format and paste them in Word and drag them to EvilLyrics.

No, I haven't tried making EvilLyrics do that sort of thing for me yet. I played around with it a bit, skipping through songs and checking what results it came up with. I found that usually I would hit some kind of leech limit in it very quickly, actually. When you get too many too fast, it stops and complains about it, basically.

So it seems like the best way would be to use EvilLyrics by actually just playing music and then checking the lyrics later. Eventually you'll get 'em all.

This is why I wrote that script with the "updateAll" variable. With that set to false, the script won't attempt to update any files in iTunes that already have lyrics. That way, you can run the program every so often and be sure that it will only get the newer lyrics from the EvilLyrics cache without messing with all the other files.

Edit: Oh, I also wrote this script, for testing and such. Might be useful. Just clears all lyrics from all files in the library. http://ottodestruct.com/iTunes/ClearLyrics.txt