MediaHuman Lyrics Finder and Fontasia: Two Programs That Work Well

Sometimes it’s the little things that frustrate you. And it’s a great delight to find programs that take those little frustrations away.

First, Fontasia. It’s a single python script (which means it’ll work wherever python is installed, so crossplatform) from Akkana’s repository of scripts which works wonderfully for what I need it to do: catalog my fonts and let me sort them the way I want them to.

It’s also possible to change the view to only one of the categories by using the “view” selector:

You can add your own categories (I added “wingdings”, “fancy”, and “typewriter”), and then assign uncategorized fonts to those categories. The process is real simple; change your view to “All uncategorized”, select the font, and then click on the category you want it to be assigned to.

For someone who has as many fonts lying around their computer as I do, this fits the bill wonderfully, and is better than the “official” font managers for Debian, Gnome, etc. The rest of the scripts in that repository are also pretty interesting, as well as her blog, “Shallow Thoughts”.

Second is MediaHuman’s Lyrics Finder.

I am quite particular when it comes to my music collection, and want to have all the tags and covers and lyrics all correct. I was despairing of finding a standalone lyrics downloader when I came across this beauty.

Completely cross platform (Win XP and up, Mac OS Lion and up, Ubuntu/Debian 16.04+), you can simply point it at your music directory and let it rip. If you want it to save the results in a text file alongside your music collection automagically, it’s a simple checkbox in the preferences, or you can do it manually. And, if for some reason it cannot find the lyrics, it has an option for you to be able to search for them online manually as well.

Once it’s found and downloaded the lyrics, then you can do whatever you like with them (such as copy them programmatically to ~/.lyrics) and so on.

Both programs are completely free; Fontasia is open source. Enjoy!

Featured Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash