Timed lyrics, tapped by ear
Timed Lyrics is a free browser tool for putting your own song's words in time with it. Play the track, hold space while a line is sung, release at its end, and it records the start and end of every line.
LRCSRTVTTJSONTXT
free, no account, nothing uploaded
Start here: paste your lyrics
One line per line. Blank lines and [section markers] are
dropped. Loading a file with the lyrics picker above fills this box
too, so either way you can edit before you start.
How it works
- Bring a track and the words. Any audio file or music video off your own disk, and the lyrics pasted in above. Nothing is uploaded.
- Tap each line as it is sung. Press play, wait out the three count, then hold space for the length of every line. The cursor moves on by itself when you let go.
- Fix and export. Click any line to edit or retime it, then take LRC, SRT, VTT, JSON or plain text, as many at once as you want.
Why tap instead of automating it
Alignment tools transcribe the vocal and match it to the words. That is accurate on distinct lines and unreliable on repetition, which is most choruses. In our own testing with OpenAI's Whisper, the no-speech detector reported silence through 20 seconds of audible singing, and the aligner then stacked 8 lines into 3 seconds, four of them running past the end of the song. Timed Lyrics has no opinion about what it hears, because you supply that part. Thirty seconds of tapping beats any amount of tuning.
Timed Lyrics compared
| Tool | How it times | Where it struggles |
|---|---|---|
| Lyric Potato | Automatic, generates a timed LRC from the audio | Repeated lines, where the transcript it aligns against is unreliable |
| Musixmatch | Community and automatic, distributes to streaming platforms | Aimed at published catalogue rather than an unreleased mix on your disk |
| Timed Lyrics | You tap each line against the track by ear | Costs you one listen through the song, and it is manual by design |
Questions
What is a timed lyric file?
A timed lyric file pairs every line of a song with the moment it is sung. LRC stores a start time per line and is what music players read to scroll lyrics. SRT and VTT store a start and an end per line and are what video editors read as subtitles. Timed Lyrics writes all three.
Why tap the lyrics instead of using automatic alignment?
Automatic alignment transcribes the vocal and matches it to the words. It is accurate on distinct lines and unreliable on repetition. On one of our own songs a transcriber reported silence through twenty seconds of audible singing, and the aligner then stacked eight lines into three seconds. A person listening does not make that mistake.
Is my song uploaded anywhere?
No. Timed Lyrics reads the file off your own disk and decodes it in your browser. No audio, video or lyric text is sent to any server, which matters for unreleased music. You can confirm it by opening your browser's network tab: after the page loads, nothing else is requested.
How long does timing a song take?
About the length of the song, once. A ninety line track takes roughly four minutes to tap and a minute to correct. Tapping at 0.7x speed is easier and just as accurate, because recorded times are always real song time rather than scaled time.
Can I use a music video instead of an audio file?
Yes. Timed Lyrics accepts mp4, mov, m4v and webm as well as audio formats, and uses the video for its audio while showing the picture so you can see where you are. The limit is fifteen minutes of duration rather than a file size, because decoded audio costs memory by the minute.
Reviewed and updated August 2026. Tested against The Plight of the Jimmys masters at 24 bit, 48 kHz.