Musixmatch matches songs on YouTube with lyrics automatically

While I'm not using YouTube a lot I know that it is one of the best sites to listen to music. Just key in a band, album, artist or song name and it is very likely that you get dozens, hundreds or even thousands of results.

The quality varies from official releases by studios and the artists to copies uploaded by fans.

These fan uploads may display the lyrics of songs either embedded in the video itself or in the video's description while the official uploads usually don't display these information on the site.

If you like lyrics, either because you want to read the song text or sing along, you may have used one of the lyrics repositories before that are available on the Internet.

Having to switch between the site and YouTube is not ideal however and a solution like Musixmatch comes to the rescue.

The service is available in many different forms: as mobile apps, for Spotify, AirPlay and Chromecast, and as a Chrome extension for YouTube.

The Chrome extension works right out of the box. After you have installed it in the browser it will automatically display the lyrics of songs it is compatible with as subtitles on the video itself.

While it won't work with every music video out there, it worked with a wide variety of videos ranging from official music videos to user uploaded videos and even live songs.

The timing is quite good as well even though you may notice a slight delay sometimes. There is unfortunately no option to change the timing to sync it with the song that is playing. I noticed this almost exclusively when I played live music videos on YouTube.

You may notice that the extension does not recognize all versions of a song that got uploaded to YouTube. If lyrics are not displayed for one, try other versions of the song to see if lyrics are displayed for it.

Conclusion

Musixmatch offers a straightforward option to display lyrics on YouTube. It works out of the box and the only requirement is that you use Chrome to watch those videos.

While it has its issues, especially when it comes to song support, it is quite accurate when it comes to timings and recognition of songs on the site.

The Chrome extension was criticized for injecting ads before but that is a thing of the past according to the description on the official Chrome Web Store.

Should you use it? It depends. If you want lyrics to be displayed this is one of the better options to ensure that. You may want to keep an eye on the extension if you install it however considering its past.