What is probably the last iPeng for iPad update of the year showed up on the App Store today.
It’s mainly meant to be a bugfix release but since it’s close to Christmas time Coolio added a nice Christmas icons and a new feature for you:
The Lyrics Screen Saver.
iPeng has been able to show lyrics for a track for a long time through it’s context menu. Yet this is not always the most convenient way to use them.
Since iPeng for iPad has somewhat flexible screen savers it looks like a good idea to add an additional one for the song text.
How does it work?
- You can swipe it in instead of the big cover art or the playlist screen saver, it’s simply a 3rd page.
- It starts to scroll automatically with a speed that makes it scroll through the whole lyrics text during the duration of the song. Note: There is currently no support for Karaoke tags so this is a bit of a guesswork and will probably not always be correct. Due to this…
- You can scroll the text manually and then iPeng will start to scroll from the new position. For what I have seen this usually should give you a correct scrolling after adjusting it once.
How Do You Get Lyrics?
There is one disclaimer: iPeng itself does not retrieve lyrics for you. Lyrics rights are a really complicated matter and it’s really hard to get a global solution for this and little Coolio can’t stem that for now. So iPeng right now needs to get the lyrics from your server and there are two means of retrieving them:
- Lyrics embedded in the music’s meta tags. If you’ve got these, they will always take precedence
- You can install the Song Lyrics plugin for Squeezebox server. This is a really cool plugin written by Erland Isaksson. You can install it right through your Squeezebox Server’s settings page (under “Plugins”). Song Lyrics uses several different lyrics sources and has only let me down on very few occasions.
So for now, the long winter nights may come…
