Displaying lyrics on iPod touch

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Displaying lyrics on iPod touch

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Q: How do I get lyrics on my iPod touch? I know you’re supposed to go to the track information and paste the lyrics in there, but they’re supposed to come up when you tap the song on the iPod touch and for some reason mine doesnt work. Any suggestions?

- Jay

A: Firstly, ensure that you are using a recent iPod touch firmware version. Lyrics support was not introduced until v1.1.3, so if your firmware version is older than that then your iPod will simply not display lyrics under any circumstances. You can confirm your iPod touch firmware version by selecting Settings, General, About on the iPod touch itself, or looking at the version number in the “Summary” screen which appears in iTunes when you connect your iPod.

If you’re running v1.1.3 or later and you have pasted the lyrics into the lyrics field for the track under the iTunes track information and they’re not showing up on your iPod, the most likely problem is that the track has not yet been re-transferred onto the iPod.

If you are using managing your iPod content manually, you will need to drag-and-drop the updated tracks from your iTunes library back onto the iPod. In manual mode, changes made in the iTunes library do not sync to the iPod in any way—the iPod and the iTunes library are treated as two distinct libraries. In this case, if you make changes to tracks in the iTunes library, you must re-copy those tracks onto the iPod for the information to be updated there.

If you are using automatic synchronization and you are certain you have synchronized your iPod after adding lyrics, then it is possible that the track information simply was not transferred to the iPod for whatever reason. In this case, the easiest solution is to remove the affected tracks from the iPod and then re-transfer them on. If you are syncing specific playlists, simply remove these tracks from those playlist(s) that you sync with your iPod, perform an automatic sync, and then re-add those tracks back to these playlists and sync again.

Alternatively, you can set your iPod to “Sync only checked” items (found on the main “Summary” screen when your iPod is connected to iTunes), and then UNcheck those tracks that you would like to remove from your iPod, sync the iPod (to actually remove them), and then RE-check them and sync the iPod again (to put them back on). This will ensure that these tracks and any related track information such as lyrics is updated on the iPod itself.

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