Scrooglyrics

Scrooglyrics is a must-have Amarok script for music lovers who desire the lyrics of their songs. While trying to find song lyrics using various Amarok lyric search engines, I was dissatisfied with the results of obscure songs. This led me to create a new script inspired by an old Windows program called EvilLyrics. The idea was to Google the lyrics and extract them from well-known websites. The result of my quick day of scripting is the lyrics metasearch script called Scrooglyrics.

Since Google's SOAP API is unreliable and does not allow new registrations, I resolved to scrape. Scroogle's cleaner markup made it a better choice to search and extract lyrics than Google. This way, the Scrooglyrics script leverages Scroogle's database to fetch song lyrics and then extracts them from reputable websites that show up in the top 20 results on Google.

The Scrooglyrics script is easy to use and allows users to add reputable sites that are not yet in its database. However, it requires the following Perl modules: WWW::Mechanize, HTML::Strip, and HTML::Entities. Users must install each of these modules by su-ing to root, after which they can use cpan to install each of them.

To use the Scrooglyrics script, users must have Amarok installed. The new release features a major rewrite, which makes it easier for users to add or disable lyrics sites. Enhancements to the whitespace cleaning and marked improvements to the overall code ensure seamless integration into the Amarok interface. Moreover, the user agent spoof feature enables the Scrooglyrics script to evade weak blocking attempts by masking it as Windows Internet Explorer 6.