Jun 26, 2008 | AJAX Lyrics Retriever

I am happy to announce the release of Lyrics Retriever 1.1 (beta, still), a free AJAX script that allows you to retrieve lyrics based on a particular artist, title, or both.

See it in action here.

It is now offered as a commercial release.

How it works: Getting the results

The current implementation is just one of many that can be done, precisely because what I am doing is parsing XML data from Leo's Lyrics, which is one of the few databases that provides an API. For example, if you're looking for a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, visiting the page

http://api.leoslyrics.com/api_search.php?auth=duane&artist=Red%20Hot%20Chili%20Peppers

gives you all the titles it finds. Alternatively, if you have the title as well, you can add an extra "songtitle" portion to obtain

http://api.leoslyrics.com/api_search.php?auth=duane&artist=Red%20Hot%20Chili%20Peppers&songtitle=Otherside

which gives you just the one song. Now the key to retrieving the lyrics lies in the hid which you'll see as part of the <result> tag. A simple XML parser would not return a particular "id", so I resorted to using xml2array, which returns an array containing all the data in the XML file. For you developer's its key to note that

For the title of the song
$result[leoslyrics][searchResults][result][$x][title][value]

Is it an exact match?
$result[leoslyrics][searchResults][result][$x][attr][exactMatch]

For the artist's name
$result[leoslyrics][searchResults][result][$x][artist][name][value]

Now also it is necessary to note that if it is an exact match, $result[leoslyrics][searchResults][result] does not have multiple entries, and so a count of its contents will actually return 4: that is, title, feat (which apparently serves no purpose), artist and name.

How it works: Getting the lyrics

Similarly to above, the query

http://api.leoslyrics.com/api_lyrics.php?auth=duane&hid=VxwOBYpM3iY=

will return all the data relevant to a particular song, including an album logo and the entire text of the lyrics.

A heartfelt thank you to the folks at Leo's Lyrics, and I hope you enjoy this script.