Melisma

Word-by-word karaoke lyrics for whatever your phone is already playing.

Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, SoundCloud, a local player — anything that plays audio. No login, no account, and it works out of the box.

Active line, mid-word	Furigana over kanji	Instrumental gap

Cinema view	Popup lyrics	Copy lines

Note

This is a port of Spicy Lyrics (a Spicetify extension) to Android — its look, its motion and its lyric model. Spicy Lyrics is AGPL-3.0, so this is too. NOTICE.md is the honest accounting of what came from where.

Contents

• What it does
• Install
• Using it
• Where the lyrics come from
• Optional tokens
• Permissions
• FAQ
• Building it
• Docs
• The name
• Credits

What it does

🎤 Word-by-word karaoke, not a scrolling teleprompter — each syllable fills as it is sung, lifts, swells and glows, and a note held over a second breaks into individually animated letters.

🎧 Follows any player. It reads the media session Android makes every audio app publish, so there is nothing to connect and no service to log into.

🈶 Romanization and furigana for Japanese (through a real dictionary, so kanji get the right reading), Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic and Greek — per syllable, so the karaoke fill still works.

🌍 Translation on the device via ML Kit. The lyrics never leave your phone.

🪟 Popup lyrics in a floating window over other apps, plus Cinema view with the album art beside the words, and a compact, minimal and simple mode.

🎨 Living background drawn from the album art, drifting on long non-repeating periods and paced by the song's tempo.

📋 Copy a line by holding it, or pick out several and copy them together.

🔋 Stops when the music does. Nothing animates, nothing polls, and after ten idle minutes the app lets go of everything keeping it alive.

The rendering, in detail

A port of Spicy Lyrics' visual language, down to the curve constants:

• Each syllable is filled by a soft gradient sweeping down through it as it is sung, while it lifts, swells past its resting size, and glows.
• A syllable held for over a second breaks into individually animated letters, so a held note ripples instead of sitting bright.
• Every other line is drawn as a blur of itself, with the radius growing the further it is from the current line. That is what gives the page its depth.
• Instrumental gaps of three seconds or more become three dots that breathe in turn.
• Duet lines pin to the opposite edge; backing vocals render smaller under their lead.
• Sung lines fade out rather than snapping back, so a breath between lines reads as one.
• Scrolling is spring-driven and hands control back to you the moment you drag.
• Songwriters and the lyrics source close the song, inside the scroll rather than in the chrome.
• Backgrounds: Living (the drifting colour field), Auto, Cover art with a blur slider, Artist, Colour, Black.

Install

1. Download the APK from the latest release and install it. Android will warn you about installing outside the Play Store; that is expected for any APK.
2. Open it and tap "Open notification access", then enable Melisma in the list that appears and come back. It picks the permission up on its own.
3. Play something. Lyrics appear.

That is the whole setup. Android 10 or newer.

Using it

Tap a line	Jumps the song to it
Hold a line	Copies it
Drag	Scrolls freely; the lyrics take back over a moment after you let go
Copy button	Pick out several lines, then copy those or all of them
Views	Lyrics fills the screen; Cinema puts the album art, scrubber and transport beside the words; Popup floats over other apps and shrinks into place when you leave, like YouTube

The one setting most people end up wanting is Sync offset. Players and audio routes add their own latency. If the highlight reaches a word before you hear it, go negative — and Bluetooth earbuds always need a negative value, because they run 150–250 ms behind what the player reports.

Every setting has a one-line description, and the ? in the settings header expands a longer explanation under each one. There is also a welcome guide in Settings → About.

Where the lyrics come from

Every enabled source is asked at once and the best answer wins — word-by-word beats line-by-line beats unsynced. Order only breaks ties: hold a row's handle in Settings → Where lyrics come from and drag it.

Source	Timing	Needs
Your own files	up to word	.lrc / .ttml you import. Always wins.
AMLL TTML Database	word	Nothing. Community-timed, hand-made, public domain.
NetEase Cloud Music	word	Nothing. Best for Japanese, Korean and Chinese — ships hand-checked romanization and translation.
Musixmatch	word	Nothing. Most Western music.
LRCLIB	line	Nothing. Open community database.
Spotify	line	An access token — see tokens.
Apple Music	word	Two tokens. The best data there is: official romanizations and translations.
Your own cache server	any	Optional, for putting one server in front of the free ones — CACHE-SERVER.md.

Four sources need no account at all — the four in the middle — and they are the ones switched on when you install it. The rest are there for the tracks the free ones miss.

Optional tokens

Skip this unless something is missing. Pasting your own credentials adds:

Spotify	Its own lyrics, the cover at full size, the artist's image, and the song's tempo
Apple Music	Word-by-word lyrics with official romanizations and translations
Musixmatch / NetEase	Higher rate limits and a wider catalogue

They are read out of a browser session you are already signed in to — there is no Melisma account and no server in between. They stay in the app's private storage and each is sent only to the service it belongs to.

→ docs/TOKENS.md has step-by-step instructions for every one of them, including how to stop having to replace the Spotify token every hour.

A source with nothing to authenticate with is skipped rather than queried, so leaving one enabled while you go and find its token costs nothing.

Permissions

Permission	Why	What leaves your phone
Notification access	The only way Android lets an app read another app's media session. The service that holds it ignores notifications entirely.	Nothing
Internet, network state	Looking lyrics up, and noticing when there is no connection to look with.	The track title, artist, album and duration, to the lyrics sources you have enabled
Install packages	Only when you accept an in-app update, which goes through Android's own confirmation screen.	Nothing

There is no analytics, no crash reporting and no account. Lyrics are cached on the device for 30 days and nowhere else.

FAQ

Do I need Spotify Premium, or a Spotify account?

No. The app reads what your phone is playing, whatever is playing it. It never talks to Spotify unless you paste a token yourself.

Does it work with YouTube Music / SoundCloud / a local player?

Yes — anything that publishes a media session, which is everything that plays audio on Android. You can also switch a player off under Settings → Players to follow, which is how you stop a podcast or a video being looked up as a song.

Why does it want notification access? That sounds like a lot.

Because it is the only way Android will let an app read another app's playback position. The service that holds the permission has an empty onNotificationPosted — it never reads a notification. It is also released automatically after ten idle minutes.

Is it on the Play Store / F-Droid?

No. Install the APK from releases; the app checks GitHub for updates itself and offers to install them.

Why is the APK 34 MB?

The Japanese dictionary and the offline translation engine are nearly all of it. Both are the price of getting kanji readings right and of translating without sending your lyrics anywhere.

Lyrics are slightly out of time.

Settings → Timing → Sync offset. Negative for Bluetooth. See above.

Can I move my settings to a new phone?

Settings → Storage and backup → Back up settings to a file. You choose where the file goes. It is plain readable JSON by default; tick Include your tokens and your credentials go in as well, encrypted under a passphrase you choose. Restoring is the row underneath, and anything the file does not mention is left as it is.

A track has no lyrics, or the wrong ones.

Settings → This track → Look this track up again forces a fresh lookup. If nothing has it, you can import a .lrc or .ttml file yourself, and that always wins.

Building it

./gradlew :app:assembleDebug      # debug APK
./gradlew :app:assembleRelease    # release APK (unsigned without a keystore)
./gradlew :app:testDebugUnitTest  # unit tests

Needs the Android SDK (platform 36) and a JDK 17+. A fresh clone never needs anybody's signing key. More in docs/DEVELOPING.md.

Docs

TOKENS.md	Every optional token, step by step
DEVELOPER-OPTIONS.md	The developer menu, and what each switch does
CACHE-SERVER.md	The request/response contract for a lyrics server of your own
DEVELOPING.md	Building, architecture, testing without a music app
RELEASING.md	Tagging a release, and checking an APK is really yours
NOTICE.md	What came from where

The name

A melisma is one syllable sung across several notes — the held note that ripples instead of sitting still. It is the thing this app draws letter by letter, and it is what a lyric sheet cannot show you.

(Formerly Better Lyrics, renamed because another project had the name first and does something different with it.)

Credits

This is Spicy Lyrics by Spikerko, read onto Android — its look, its animation curves, its lyric model and its TTML dialect. The spring is a port of Fraktality's spr (MIT) and the curves of cubic-spline (MIT). The word-by-word lyrics that arrive with no account come from the AMLL TTML Database, hand-timed by its contributors and dedicated to the public domain. Beautiful Lyrics by surfbryce is prior art and a reference point; no code from it is used.

Lyrics belong to their writers and publishers. None of the sources here are affiliated with this app.

Licensed AGPL-3.0 — see LICENSE, NOTICE.md, and Settings → Credits and licences in the app itself.