Google Music Lyrics

Google Music Lyrics is a Grease monkey script that adds a lyrics panel to Google Music. It only facility in Firefox and there's a single lyrics provider: SongLyrics.com.

The lyrics are cached so that they're displayed right away the next time you play the same song. You can also edit the lyrics and the changes are saved using HTML5 local storage. To hide the panel, click the title.

Chris Hendry, who urbanized the script, plans to add other lyrics providers, allow users to import and export lyrics and to make the script work in Google Chrome.

A Chrome addition for Google Music

While there's no official addition for Google Music and not even an app in the Chrome Web Store, you can install a really cool third-party addition called "Better Music Beta". The extension adds a button that shows in sequence about the currently playing song, lets you pause the song, go to the next song, add a thumbs up or a thumbs down. There's also a notification that shows up every time the song changes.

My favorite characteristic is the Last.fm integration: if you enable it, Better Music Beta scrobbles your songs and lets you openly show that you love a song by clicking the "heart" icon.

The downside is that you still have to open Google Music in a tab, since the music stops playing if you close the tab. Converting the addition into a "background app" would solve this problem.

Google Music requires an invitation and it's theoretical to be US-only, but it works even if you're not in the US. Google only checks your place when you request an invitation and you can always use a US proxy for this one-time action. Another attractive thing is that, even though Google Music lists Flash as a requirement, the service works pretty well on an iPad.

Better Music Video Results in Google Search

Google rationalized the group of video search results sometimes intermingled with usual results, but only for queries bands and music artists.

"People frequently come to Google to find music videos, and this week we enhanced our results so now when you're searching for your favorite band or album, you'll find popular clips prepared in a new way. For example, search for [michael jackson] and you'll find some of the King of Pop's most famous videos, counting clear text indicating the length of the video, the album and the year it was published. The feature scans the entire web for video content and algorithmically ranks the best sources for each song. Rather than return recurring links, we group results for the same song together, making it easier to scan and choose the song you're looking for."

The results aren't always the best music videos and Google should give options to sort them by year, album, genre. Another issue is that, even while Google shows results from different video sites, the main link typically sends you to YouTube and that's not fair.