This is the tool I kept wishing existed while I was putting together karaoke tracks for a friend’s birthday. An LRC file is just a lyric sheet with a timestamp on every line — and once you have one, a surprising number of programs will scroll your words in time with the music. Most of them are free, none of them agree on anything else, and none of them will help you make the file in the first place.
So here it is. Paste the words, load the song off your own hard drive, press space every time a line starts, download the file. That is the whole workflow, and it is deliberately the same one people used in 2005, because it is still faster than typing timestamps by hand.
The audio never leaves your device. There is no upload step anywhere in this page — the browser reads the file straight off disk and plays it locally, the same way it would play a file you opened in a media player. I cannot see your song and I cannot see your words.
No file handy? Press Start and stamp against whatever is already playing — your phone, YouTube, another tab. The result is identical; only the clock source changes. Load a file later and it takes over automatically.
Safari note: macOS Safari will not start sound until you press a button yourself, so use Start rather than the play triangle inside the player. If a file never plays, it is almost always the codec — mp3, m4a and wav are safe, flac / ogg / wma are not.
Space works anywhere on the page. The arrow keys, Backspace and R need the list itself focused — click it once. Space stamps the current line · ↑ ↓ move the cursor without stamping · Backspace undoes · R rewinds one second before the last stamp and un-stamps it, so you can take that line again. Nothing stamps until the clock above is running.
No lines loaded yet.
Paste a file to get started.
SRT output works out each cue’s end time from the next cue, so keep at least one blank frame of air between lines. LRC→SRT drops the milliseconds a karaoke player would use for word-level highlighting — that is a limit of the format, not of this tool.
The tool runs entirely in your browser. Your audio file is read through a local blob URL, your lyrics stay in a textarea, and the .lrc file is generated on your own machine.
There is no account, no login and no save button, which also means there is no autosave. If you reload the page, your work is gone — export before you close the tab.
How to get a clean file on the first pass
Six small habits that save you from doing the whole song twice.
- Strip the section tags before you paste. [Verse] and [Chorus] are invisible while you are writing and extremely visible when the line is projected on a screen.
- Stamp a fraction early, not late. A cue that lands 80 ms before the voice is forgiving; one that lands after it feels broken for the rest of the song.
- Use R constantly. It rewinds one second and un-stamps the previous line, so a missed cue costs you two seconds instead of a replayed verse.
- Do the whole song in one sitting. Your feel for where the line starts drifts if you come back to it the next day, and you will hear the drift.
- Fix global lateness with the offset box rather than re-stamping. If every line is 400 ms behind, type 400 and export again — that is what the box is for.
- Test it in the thing you actually use. Open the .lrc in your karaoke player before you trust it; some want .lrc next to the .mp3 with matching filenames, others do not care.
Why the format is worth the faff
What you can actually do with a timed lyric file once you have one.
Desktop karaoke players read it, and so do a lot of music players you already have — anything that shows scrolling words is almost certainly reading LRC. Video editors take it too: drop the matching SRT on a timeline and your lyrics become captions that nobody has to retype. Lyric videos, church projection, language learning, and the sing-along video you make for a friend all start from the same file.
The one honest limitation: plain LRC timestamps lines, not words. If you want the karaoke-ball effect that fills in each syllable, you need the word-level variant, and that means timestamping every word — a genuinely different and much slower job. This tool does the line version, which is what most people actually need.
Common questions
Does my audio file get uploaded anywhere?
No. The browser reads it from your disk directly and plays it locally. There is no upload in the code on this page, and no server receives your file or your lyrics. Everything is forgotten when you close the tab.
Do I need to load an audio file?
No. If you would rather not, press Start in step 2 and the built-in stopwatch becomes the clock — useful when the song is playing on your phone, on YouTube, or in another tab. Load a file at any point and it takes over automatically. The stamps are the same either way.
What format does the output use?
Standard LRC — one [mm:ss.cc] timestamp per line, sorted by time. That is the version almost every karaoke player, media player and subtitle tool understands. The second tab will also convert it to SRT if you need proper subtitle cues with end times. If the destination is a phone rather than a player, paste the result into the Short-Video Caption Splitter and it will chop it into vertical caption screens for you.
My lyrics are consistently late. Do I have to redo them?
No. Type the delay into the offset box in milliseconds — 400 means every cue moves 400 ms later — and export again. Negative numbers move everything earlier. The stamps you took are kept as raw times, so you can change the offset as often as you like.
Can I start from a file I already have?
Yes. The Convert & fix existing files tab reads LRC and SRT, shifts every cue by a fixed amount, converts between the two, and can hand the result straight to the timer if you need to finish off a few lines by hand.
Why does the keyboard stop working?
Space is listened for anywhere on the page. The arrow keys, Backspace and R only work while the line list itself has focus — otherwise they would fight with scrolling and typing. Click anywhere in the list once and those come back. Every shortcut also has a button underneath if you would rather use the mouse.
I pressed Download and nothing seemed to happen.
On Safari and Chrome the file goes straight to your Downloads folder without any animation, so it can look like nothing happened. The status line under the editor changes to Saved ….lrc the moment it works, so check that first. If it still does not appear, use Copy and paste into a text editor — LRC is plain text and any editor will do.
The tool looks dead: no version badge, no buttons doing anything.
There is a small ready · v4 label to the right of the two tabs. If it says anything else, or is missing, your browser is showing a cached copy of the page — press Cmd + Shift + R on a Mac (Ctrl + Shift + R on Windows) to force a fresh load. If the badge reads failed to start, the message underneath it says why.
Is this a lyrics database?
No. SongTextAI does not store, search or display existing song lyrics, and this tool does not fetch any. You supply the words, either by pasting them or by transcribing them yourself.
Back to writing
If you landed here before you had lyrics to time up, these are the generators people start with.
- Emotion, Love & Faith29
- Everyday Life & Places21
- World, Latin & Afro19
- Holidays & Seasons17
- Story, Fantasy & Worlds16
- Hip-Hop & Rap15
- Occasions & Milestones15
Or go back to the full list of tools, the generators I use most, or the most recent batch.