Musebase for Windows

Real-time, bilingual lyrics on your Windows desktop.

Formerly known as LyricsX for Windows.

English · 한국어

🌐 Homepage & demo · ⬇️ Download

Musebase automatically finds the lyrics of the song you're playing, syncs them line-by-line (and word-by-word), and shows the original text with its translation as a transparent desktop overlay. It's a Windows-native rewrite of the macOS app LyricsX.

Features

• Automatic playback detection — via Windows SMTC. Works with Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and any player that supports media keys. Auto mode ignores browser sessions; you can also lock onto a specific player.
• Multi-source lyrics search — LRCLIB, NetEase, Kugou (酷狗), and QQ Music (QQ音乐), merged and auto-ranked by quality. Sources can be toggled in Settings.
• Word-level karaoke — character-by-character fill for sources that provide inline timing (Kugou / QQ / NetEase), with line-level fallback otherwise.
• Bilingual display — original and translated lines stacked together. Uses the source's own translation first, and falls back to machine translation — MyMemory (free, no key), DeepL, Google Cloud Translation, or LibreTranslate (your API key / endpoint).
• Desktop overlay — transparent, click-through, always-on-top. Move/resize, fade in/out, optional background panel, auto-hide on fullscreen apps / pause / mouse-over. Hover to show media controls (previous / play-pause / next).
• Edit & export — fix the current lyrics in-app (lossless), export to .lrc, or mark wrong lyrics to suppress them.
• Offline cache — found lyrics (with translations) are stored in SQLite for instant, offline replay.
• Localized UI — 19 languages — the interface follows your system language (English fallback), selectable in Settings. Help translate »
• Privacy — your DeepL API key is stored encrypted (Windows DPAPI) and masked in the UI.
• Automatic updates — Velopack delta updates from GitHub Releases.

Download & install

Get the latest build from Releases:

• Musebase-win-Setup.exe — installs with automatic updates (recommended).
• Musebase-win-Portable.zip — no installation; unzip and run.

The app isn't code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may warn on first launch — choose More info → Run anyway.

Upgrading from LyricsX for Windows (≤ 0.9.x): the rename breaks the auto-update chain — please install Musebase manually once. Your settings, cache, and encrypted API key are migrated automatically on first launch.

Requirements

• Windows 10 version 2004 (20H1) or later, or Windows 11
• No .NET install required (builds are self-contained)

Usage

1. Run Musebase.exe → a green M icon appears in the tray (the hidden-icons ^ area).
2. Play music → lyrics appear automatically near the bottom of the screen.
3. Right-click the tray icon:
   • Search lyrics… — search and replace when auto-matching is wrong
   • Edit current lyrics… / Export (.lrc)…
   • Playback source — auto (ignores browsers) or a specific player
   • Move/resize overlay — drag to reposition, then toggle off
   • Settings… — display language, translation engine, lyrics sources, overlay style
4. Overlay only (no playback): Musebase.exe --demo

Machine translation (optional)

Out of the box, lines without a translation in your target language are machine-translated via MyMemory (free, no key required). For higher quality, pick another engine in Settings and paste that engine's key — the key box follows the engine you select: DeepL API (free tier: 500k characters/month) or Google Cloud Translation (enable the API in the Google Cloud console and create an API key — paid, usage-based). Optionally, Musebase can switch back to the free engine automatically when the selected engine fails (quota, network). Translations are cached per line (each song is translated only once). Keys are stored encrypted.

Translating the UI

The interface ships in 19 languages (English + Korean hand-translated, plus DeepL seeds). Anyone can improve translations directly on GitHub — see TRANSLATING.md (English).

Build

dotnet build src/Musebase.Windows          # dev build
dotnet test  tests/Musebase.Core.Tests     # unit tests

Releasing (Velopack + GitHub Releases) is documented in RELEASING.md.

Project structure

src/Musebase.Core/     # UI-agnostic domain: LRC parsing, providers, ranking, translation, cache
src/Musebase.Engine/   # UI-agnostic orchestration: playback contracts, coordinator, view state
src/Musebase.Windows/  # WPF app: SMTC detection, sync, overlay, tray, settings, i18n
contracts/             # serialized contracts shared across platforms (PlaybackViewState)
tools/                 # mt-bootstrap.ps1 (DeepL translation seeds)
spikes/                # technical spikes (SMTC / overlay / search)

License

Musebase for Windows is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0).

It is based on LyricsX and LyricsKit by ddddxxx (both MPL-2.0) — the lyrics-parsing and lyrics-search logic in src/Musebase.Core is ported from LyricsKit. Files ported from LyricsKit remain governed by the MPL-2.0, and their provenance is noted in each file's header comment.