Vertical video has its own rules, and one of them is that nobody is going to read a wall of text on a phone they are holding at arm’s length. Two lines, about thirty-two characters each, long enough to read and gone before it becomes work. That is the whole idea behind captioning a Reel, a Short or a TikTok, and doing it by hand is the most tedious twenty minutes in the job.
This does it in one paste. Drop your lyric in — or the .lrc you already made — and it chops the words into screens under whatever limits you set, shows you each one the way a vertical video will actually show it, and hands back a duration for every screen plus an SRT file you can drop straight onto a timeline.
It runs entirely in your browser. There is no upload step, no account and no queue: the words stay in a textarea, the file is generated on your own machine, and the result is a plain .srt, .lrc or .txt you can open anywhere. I cannot see what you paste.
Paste a lyric to get started.
No screens yet.
Every screen has Merge down (fold it into the next one) and Split (cut it in half, splitting its time between the two halves). Auto-splitting is a good first guess, not a verdict — fix the two or three it gets wrong and move on.
SRT is what video editors and caption importers want. Plain text is what you paste straight into a mobile editor, screen by screen. LRC is for taking the result back to a music or karaoke player. All three are plain files you own.
Your lyric never leaves the browser. There is no upload anywhere in the code on this page, and no server receives your text or your files.
There is no save button, because there is no account. That also means no autosave — export before you close the tab or you will be pasting it again.
Getting captions people actually read
Six things that matter more than which font you pick.
- Break at a thought, not at a character count. The limits are a guardrail, not a target — if a screen ends mid-phrase the viewer stumbles, and stumbling is when they scroll away.
- Respect the safe area. The bottom of a vertical video is covered by the caption bar, the like button and the description, so keep your words above it. The previews above leave that strip empty on purpose.
- If you already have timings, use them. Paste the .lrc or .srt instead of the plain lyric and every screen keeps its real start time, which saves you from nudging all thirty of them later.
- Watch the shortest screen, not the longest. A screen that flashes for half a second is worse than one that runs a little long — use Merge down on anything under your minimum.
- Read it out loud at the pace you set. Fourteen characters a second is a comfortable default for singing along; talking-head captions can go faster, dense rap often needs slower.
- Export the plain text if you are captioning inside a phone app. Most mobile editors want you to type each screen anyway, and one block per screen makes that a copy-and-paste job.
Why two lines and thirty-two characters
Where those defaults came from, and when to ignore them.
They are not a law. They are what tends to fit: around thirty-two characters sits comfortably inside a phone-width caption without shrinking the type, and two lines is about what the eye can take in before the viewer starts reading instead of watching. Every major platform lands somewhere near there, and every one of them will happily show you more — the cost is attention, not a rule violation.
The honest limitation: an automatic splitter cannot hear your song. It breaks on length and on line boundaries, not on phrasing, so it will occasionally cut in a place a person never would. That is what the Merge down and Split buttons are for — the tool gets you ninety per cent of the way in a second and lets you fix the rest without starting over.
Common questions
Is my lyric uploaded anywhere?
No. The whole tool runs in your browser. Your text stays in a textarea, the file is built on your own machine when you press Download, and nothing is sent to a server at any point. The site still runs analytics and cookies like any other site — those are described in the privacy policy — but your words are not part of them.
Can I use an LRC or SRT file I already have?
Yes, and you should. Paste it straight into the box and the tool reads the timestamps out of it, then keeps the real start time on every screen it builds. If your source is an .lrc made with the LRC Lyric Timing Editor, the two tools are designed to hand off to each other.
What if my lyric has no timings at all?
Then the pace setting decides: each screen is held for as long as it takes to read it at the characters-per-second rate you choose, clamped between your shortest and longest screen. It is an estimate, not a measurement — good enough to export and nudge, and much faster than timing forty lines by hand.
Why is one of my screens flagged?
Either it still runs past your character limit — usually one unbreakable long word, which you can only fix by rewording or raising the limit — or it is shorter than your minimum, which Merge down will fix in one click. The message under the grid tells you which it is and how many there are.
Do the exports work in CapCut, Premiere and the rest?
SRT is the common denominator and every serious editor imports it. Plain text is for the mobile apps that would rather you typed each screen yourself. LRC goes back to music players and karaoke software. All three are ordinary files — nothing here produces a format that only works inside this website.
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. If you do not have permission to use a lyric, do not paste it here.
Back to writing
If you landed here before you had words to caption, 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.