Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

ALSong - Free media player that displays lyrics to songs

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 03:07 AM PDT

ALSong is one of the better media player utilities from ESTsoft. I was particularly intrigued by it because it supports real time lyric displays as your songs play. The minimum system requirements are a mere Windows 2000/XP/Vista with a CPU 333MHz + and RAM 64 MB + of RAM. This media player plays mp3 music and has an integrated web radio, which you can use to play songs from a broadcasting radio on the web.

To add mp3 files or folders to your playlist, click File then select Add File, Folder or URL. If you select file you can only play and add 1 file at a time, if you have selected Folder you can play and add all the files in the folder and all of its sub-folders. For adding URLs you have to enter the address of the website of the music you want to play (i.e. Last.fm).

After adding mp3 files or folder to your playlist, you can start playing your mp3's by clicking the play button.

If you want to customize your equalizer for better sound output, enable the equalizer and select your preferred equalization. The interface is very WinAmp-like:

If you want to play music via web radio, click File > Web Radio > Listen to Web Radio then enter the web address of the broadcasting web radio.

As you can see there is nothing radical or different to its interface but best feature of it is its capability to download lyrics as you play your song. When you open a song the lyrics gets displayed on the lyrics window and also at the lower part of your desktop:

The lyric displays a bold font to the current line of the song and it moves the display as the song is played. This way users can sing along to it like a Karaoke. If only it highlights the exact phrase and not the entire line then it would have been a killer-app. I like how it auto downloads lyrics so there is no setup required to be able to download and display the lyrics.

My complain is that it has a limited lyrics database. I was stunned that it did not have a data for the classic Etta James' I'd Rather Go Blind.

It is not a perfect media player but it beats the other media players when it comes to the automatic lyrics download and display capability. If you want lyrics with your current media player, such as Windows Media player, you can read my previous post about EvilLyrics, a cool app that works with many media players and that will display lyrics for the song you are playing.