genius-tui

Synced lyrics for whatever is playing, in your terminal.

Detects the currently playing song system-wide on macOS, fetches time-synchronized lyrics from LRCLIB (free, no API key), and falls back to scraping plain lyrics from Genius when no synced version exists. Synced lines highlight and auto-scroll in time with playback.

Note: Genius itself only has plain-text lyrics (no timestamps), which is why LRCLIB is the primary source for true sync.

Install & run

uvx genius-tui            # run without installing
# or
pip install genius-tui && genius-tui
# or, from a checkout
uv run genius-tui

Now-playing backends

Tried in order; the first one that works is remembered:

1. media-control — system-wide, works on macOS 15.4+ (brew install media-control)
2. nowplaying-cli — system-wide, older macOS (brew install nowplaying-cli)
3. Spotify via AppleScript (no install needed)
4. Apple Music via AppleScript (no install needed)

So with Spotify or Apple Music it works out of the box; install media-control for other players (browser, VLC, etc.). The first AppleScript call may trigger a macOS Automation permission prompt for your terminal.

Keys

Behavior notes

• Synced (LRCLIB): current line is highlighted and centered.
• Plain (LRCLIB/Genius): position is estimated from track progress, so scrolling is approximate.
• Header shows position, lyrics source, and detection backend; a non-zero sync offset appears top-right (e.g. delay +1.5s).