I use Apple Music to stream my local file library on my computer. My process to getting the music I downloaded on my computer to my phone is this:
I have the files of the song (usually in .flac) on my computer and I use Mp3tag and kid3 to tag the files to my liking
I convert the file to .m4a (the metadata carries over in conversion)
As sort of a safety measure, I drag the .m4a files into Mp3tag, select them all and then press CTRL + S to really save the tags
I finally upload the files from my computer onto my phone via iTunes
This was my process for years; however, as the title suggests, a wrench has been thrown into my works - since upgrading to iOS 18.0, the field in which I usually put lyrics in, "UNSYNCEDLYRICS", doesn't work anymore. Any new .m4a song file with the UNSYNCEDLYRICS field filled out that I drag onto my phone has a static, greyed out lyric button at the bottom of my screen in the Apple Music playlist view. For the songs that were downloaded on my phone before iOS 18, however, the lyric button is whitened to indicate lyrical content is tagged with the song - I press the button and the lyrics appear. Mind you, those files too had the lyrics tagged in the UNSYNCEDLYRICS field. I even tried using the field "LYRICS" over "UNSYNCEDLYRICS", but that doesn't work either.
I don't expect an immediate solution because this iOS update literally just came out 4 days ago, but this does bother me some and I'd like to see if you folks could propose new approaches to resolve this problem.
If you load songs from your phone - where you see the "static, greyed out lyric button" - into Mp3tag, do you see the content in UNSYNCEDLYRICS in Mp3tag (press Alt+T)?
I also want to point out that UNSYNCEDLYRICS are a MP3/ID3 thing, the other formats do not differentiate between synced or unsynced lyrics. The tag is mapped to the lyrics tag for other formats.
You're right: this isn't necessarily an Mp3tag problem, but I wanted to consult a community online that would seem to know their way around music metadata in general. I will be extending my request to the Apple forums.
Currently I don't have access to my computer, so in a few hours time I should be able to provide screenshots of my situation to better diagnose the problem.
(1/3) Hey. Sorry for the late reply - I tried taking my business to the proper Apple Music discussion board, but to no avail. I'll have to break this reply into 3 parts since I learned I can't embed more than 3 files in one post.
Here's a screenshot of the ALT + T view in Mp3tag of the .m4a file I intend on dragging onto my phone. I've boxed the UNSYNCEDLYRICS field that all my lyrics are in.
Here's the same .m4a file dragged onto my phone via iTunes. The other screenshot shows that even iTunes recognizes lyrics tagged with the file (I didn't manually input the lyrics in iTunes).
(2/3) When I do go into Apple Music on my phone, everything looks fine until I play the song, go into the queue view, and see that the lyrics button is greyed out.
I realized it probably helps if I show that these files exist on the same phone, so I've unblurred the name of my phone. In addition, I've added the add and modification date of the song with the lyrics issue.
but if you open up “View Credits” for the song, you should be able to view the lyrics in plaintext there. Probably your best bet until this gets fixed.
then it seems as Apple has mixed up the tag with lyrics content.
Since iOS 18.0.1 just released, I figured I'd give an update:
No, iOS 18.0.1 has not fixed this lyrics issue, but I have found somewhat a solution that works for me. It is really tedious, however.
The solution: keep dragging the song from my computer to iTunes and deleting it until the lyrics appear for the song in Apple Music.
A few weeks ago, I wanted to mention the fact that although the songs I'd upload from my computer to iPhone through iTunes did not have viewable lyrics in Apple Music, there were very rare instances where the lyrics did appear; the chance of this happening was roughly 1 in 10 songs, however. It's quite a peculiarity and I suppose further proves this is just a bug the Apple team overlooked... on both official iOS 18 releases thus far.
Let me show an example of two songs which I put on my phone recently:
I had to drag Everything is romantic from File Explorer to iTunes and delete it maybe 50 times before the lyrics appeared. It was really that tedious, but sure enough, the lyrics were visible!
365, on the other hand, I just dragged and dropped into iTunes once. If I've got 10 minutes to spare, I'll do the drag & delete method (as I'd like to coin it) to hopefully get lyrics on it.
