Video timeline:
0-5:55 How to use the editor
5:55-15:52 What to fix in the editor
What the editor does
The Lyrics Editor lets you place each word (or syllable) of a song's lyrics on an exact point of the audio's timeline, so that a karaoke player can highlight the right word at the right moment.
You work with three things:
The audio — shown as a waveform you can zoom, scroll and play.
The words — each word is a region: a coloured block on the waveform whose left edge is the word's start time and right edge is its end time.
Lines — words are grouped into lyric lines, shown in the lyrics panel and the karaoke preview.
Editing is mostly: listen, then drag the word blocks so they line up with what you hear, fixing the text where needed. Every change can be undone.
The interface at a glance
The window has four areas:
Area | Where | What it's for |
Karaoke preview | Top-left | A live preview of how the lyrics will look in a karaoke player. Read-only. |
Lyrics panel | Right side | The lyrics as a scrolling list of lines. Click a word to jump to it; double-click to rename. |
Transport bar | Middle strip | Play/pause, zoom, speed, save, find, theme, help and more. |
Waveform / timeline | Bottom | The audio waveform with word regions. This is where most timing edits happen. In a multi-track song there is one lane per singer. |
The divider between the top panes and the waveform can be dragged to make the waveform taller or shorter.
Playback and moving around
Play and pause
Click the play / pause button (far left),
or press Space.
Moving around the waveform view
The playhead or timeline is the vertical line that marks the current time.
Click anywhere on the ruler of the timeline (the time strip above the waveform) to jump the playhead there.
During playback the view scrolls to keep the playhead centred.
Jump to the next region
Click the next-region button or press N to jump to next available region.
Zoom
There are two ways to zoom the timeline:
Zoom slider — drag the PPS slider in the middle of the transport bar.
Pinch to zoom — pinch with two fingers on a trackpad (or hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel) while the pointer is over the waveform view.
Playback speed
Drag the speed slider to slow down or speed up playback.
Useful for catching fast lyrics.
Click the reset button next to the slider to jump straight back to
1.0×.
Looping a section
You can loop a stretch of audio to work on it repeatedly:
Paint a loop: click-and-drag across the ruler / timeline to mark a range.
Drag the loop's edge handles to fine-tune the bounds.
Toggle the loop on/off with the loop button, or press C.
Double-click the ruler to clear the loop.
Fly mode
The fly-mode toggle controls whether the playhead jumps to a word when you select it.
Fly mode OFF (default): selecting a word seeks the playhead to it.
Fly mode ON: the playhead stays put when you select words.
Autoplay
The autoplay toggle decides whether placing the cursor on a new place on the timeline or clicking a region automatically starts playback.
Find and replace
This is handy for example for removing all punctuation marks from the text if some have been accidentally left in at the transcription phase.
Click the magnifying-glass button in the transport bar to open the panel.
Type the text to find in Find, and optionally the replacement in Replace.
Click Replace All.
Close the panel with Esc, by clicking outside it, or by clicking the magnifying glass again.
Words, regions and selection
Each word is a coloured word region on the waveform.
Its left edge is the start time, its right edge is the end time.
Select one word
Click a region. It turns amber to show it's selected, and the matching word highlights in the lyrics panel.
Click empty waveform (between regions) to clear the selection.
Select several words
Shift + click a region to add or remove it from the selection (toggle). Keep Shift-clicking to build up a group.
Shift + drag across empty waveform to draw a lasso box — every region the box touches is selected.
Press Cmd/Ctrl + A to select all words on the active track.
Press Home to jump to and select the first word.
Move the selection with the keyboard
Tab selects the next word; Shift + Tab selects the previous word.
If fly mode is OFF, Tab/Shift+Tab also seek the playhead to the word.
Move a word
Drag the middle of a region left or right to change its timing.
The editor protects you from collisions. If a neighbour region is in the way but has room to spare, it shrinks to make space.
You can choose and move several words at once
Resize a word (change start or end)
Move the pointer to the left or right edge of a region — the cursor becomes a ↔ resize arrow.
Drag the left edge to change the start time
Drag the right edge to change the end time.
A neighbour region will shrink to make room if the regions overlap
Editing the text of a word region
There are two places to fix a word's text.
Both edit the same data.
On the waveform view
Double-click a region to open an inline text box over it.
Type your correction.
Enter commits, Esc cancels.
Tab / Shift + Tab commit and move to the next / previous word, so you can correct several words in a row without reaching for the mouse.
In the lyrics panel
Double-click a word in the lyrics panel to select and edit
Enter or click away commits made edit, Esc cancels
Tab and Shift + Tab moves to the next or previous word.
Aligning regions
When you've selected two or more words, you can use our glue tool to "glue" the words regions seamlessly together. This only needs to be done if there are very short miniregions or very fast lines with a lot of small regions after one another.
Essentially it makes the lines color out smoother in Singa player.
A — align right: stretches each word's end forward to meet the next word's start. The last word in the selection is left untouched.
Shift + A — align left: stretches each word's start backward to meet the previous word's end. The first word in the selection is left untouched.
Creating and deleting regions
Create a word by dragging
Hold Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows/Linux) and drag across empty place in the waveform view.
Release to create. If the band is shorter than the 0.1 s minimum, nothing is created.
Create a word while listening on playback
Play the audio.
When the word you want starts, press and hold R. A region begins at that moment.
Its end follows the playhead, growing as the song plays.
Release R at the end of the word to commit it.
Notes: R only works while playing and only in an empty gap. Press Esc to throw the draft away.
Delete words
Select one or more regions and press Delete or Backspace.
Splitting a word
Splitting turns one word region into two separately timed regions.
This is used in situations where we have forgotten to hyphenate a word while making a transcription and have to divide the word into shorter and longer syllables in the editor.
Press S with the playhead inside a region:
While playing — the word will be divided by the cursor and you have to manually fix the divination of the text in the word regions.
While paused — the word editing opens and you can place the insertion point to where you want to divide the word and press enter. Now it will automatically divide the word into ready syllables with the text divided as well.
Example of pressing S while playback paused:
Word we want to divide where the cursor is:
2. After pressing S and the text divination edit opens:
3. Finding the place where I want to divide the word with the insertion point:
4. After pressing enter the region is divided where the red cursor is and word was divided where we placed the insertion point.
Lines and line breaks
In the lyrics panel you can reshape lines around the selected word:
Shift + Enter/Return — split the line after the selected word (start a new line).
Shift + Delete (or Shift + Backspace) — merge the selected word's line into the previous line.
There is also a visual character counter that will show you the suggested 25 character per line with a red letter.
Copy, paste, undo and redo
Cmd/Ctrl + C — copy the selected words.
Cmd/Ctrl + V — paste them at the current playhead. If the paste would overlap existing words it is adjusted or rejected so nothing is clobbered.
Cmd/Ctrl + Z — undo.
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Z (or Ctrl + Y) — redo.
Saving your work
Click the Save button (the disk icon)
The Save button shows an accent colour blue whenever you have unsaved changes. After a successful save it returns to normal.
Note: The editor never saves on its own — your changes are only stored when you click Save.
Dark and light theme + key command cheatsheet
Click the sun / moon button (right of the right-to-left toggle) to switch between dark and light themes. Your choice is remembered.
Click the ? button at the far right of the transport bar for a quick cheat-sheet of the most common actions.
To close the help overlay press Esc or click outside it.