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Dynamic Music Pill adds word-by-word lyrics highlighting
An updated version of Dynamic Music Pill, the GNOME Shell extension to put now playing track info and lyrics in your panel or dock with animated flourishes, is out.
If you’re prone some desk-side crooning, Dynamic Music Pill v1.3.0 brings two new lyrics provider APIs, BetterLyrics and BiniLyrics, with TTML1 parsing to provide word-by-word karaoke-style highlighting.
If there’s word-level synced lyrics for the track being played, the extension shows them in the applet controller (click on the album art inside of to access the lyrics view) or the panel, depending on how you’ve configured it:
Dynamic Music Pill can show word-level synced lyric highlighting in the pill itself – dock or panel – if you enable the ‘word-level karaoke in pill’ toggle.
If word-by-word lyrics aren’t available for the currently playing track, the extension happily falls back to line-by-line synced or static lyrics, if available from the four lyrics providers it supports in total. If no lyrics are found, you get nowt.
Is this fun? Sure. But depending on the pill width (you can set a fixed width, if you want) and how fast the lyrics are sung or rapped, it can be hard to keep up – lines whiz by too far, not giving you much time to register the words being highlighted2.
It certainly looks difficult in the dock rather than a panel, as there’s less width, though the greater height means text is readable…
Not a fan of warbling? No worries; there are some smaller quality-of-life improvements in the new Dynamic Music Pill v1.3.0 release.
The extension already lets you adjust volume by scrolling over on the pill, but now you can choose what volume you change when doing it: the active media player or your overall system volume. An in-pill OSD shows feedback on levels when using this feature.
The shadow beneath album art in the pill popover can be turned off, if you’d prefer a flatter look.