Lyrimuse VS Nullstack

Lyrimuse's answer

People who listen to music on a Mac while they work or study and want to follow the lyrics without switching windows. Many of them listen in more than one language, such as K-pop, J-pop, Cantonese and Mandarin songs alongside English ones, and use the translation and romanization lines to sing along or learn the words. Others are Last.fm users who want Apple Music, Spotify or QQ Music plays scrobbled automatically and like seeing their listening stats, heatmap and streaks. It also suits anyone who used LyricsX and wants a maintained replacement.

Lyrimuse's answer

I listen to Apple Music on my Mac all day and wanted the lyrics on my desktop. The app everyone recommended, LyricsX, hadn't had a release since 2022, so in July 2026 I started building my own. The hard part turned out not to be drawing the lyrics but finding the right ones: the same song exists as a live version, a remaster, a duet or a translated release, and a single lyrics source often gets it wrong. That's why Lyrimuse asks many sources and scores the answers. It's open source on GitHub, and many of its features came from users' issues and suggestions.

Lyrimuse's answer

Lyrimuse is a free, open source desktop lyrics app for Mac that cares about getting the right lyrics, not just any lyrics. For every song it searches fifteen sources at once, including Musixmatch, LRCLIB, NetEase Cloud Music, QQ Music and Apple Music, and scores every result on title, artist, album, length and word timing. So a live recording or a remaster gets its own lyrics instead of the studio version, and you can open the decision panel to see why a song got the lyrics it did. The lyrics then play karaoke-style, word by word, wherever you want them: a floating line on the desktop, the menu bar, a Dynamic-Island-style capsule under the notch, the Touch Bar, a full lyrics window modeled on Apple Music's, or a phone or tablet as a second screen.

Lyrimuse's answer

If you are looking for a LyricsX alternative, Lyrimuse covers what LyricsX did and is still actively updated (LyricsX's last release was in April 2022). It works with fourteen Mac players: Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, KKBOX, Kaset for YouTube Music, QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, Kugou Music, Soda Music, LX Music, reAMP, VOX, Pine Player and foobar2000, plus YouTube Music and Spotify Web playing in a browser tab. It runs on macOS 14 or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel. On top of synced lyrics it shows a translation under each line in 17 languages, pinyin, Cantonese Jyutping and Japanese and Korean romanization, and doubles as a Last.fm scrobbler for Mac with your own listening stats. It's free, with no account and no subscription.

Lyrimuse's answer

The app is written in Swift with SwiftUI and AppKit, and the lyrics engine that searches and scores the fifteen sources is written in Go. Lyrimuse reads what's playing through each player's AppleScript interface (Apple Music, Spotify, Kaset) or through macOS's Now Playing information via the open source media-control tool, and talks to browser players through a small browser pairing. Translations come from the lyrics source when it has one; if you turn on fallback translation, your Mac translates the rest with Apple's on-device Translation framework. OpenCC data handles Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Last.fm and ListenBrainz handle scrobbling.