I think it would be cool if tracks with LRC or embedded lyrics that are unsynced and only contain “instrumental” could display a special graphic (such as the one featured in Apple Music) that reads “This track is an instrumental,” with a music note icon or some other similar pop-up.
Another thing that could trigger this is if the LRC or embedded lyrics only contained “[au: instrumental]”, which is a new way that GitHub developers, such as LRCGet, are trying to standardize the identification of instrumental tracks.
Problem solved:
Instrumental tracks will no longer have a static “instrumental” text displayed when lyrics are opened (or sometimes even nothing at all); instead, they will feature a graphic to indicate the purely instrumental nature of the track.
Brought benefits:
Improves the app’s UI and makes lyrics a lot more appealing and interactive.
Other application solutions:
LRCGET does this well by using Lrc’s ID system. They apply “[au: instrumental]” to the tags of instrumental tracks and it allows them to distinguish instrumental and non-instrumental tracks far beyond lyrics alone.
Can’t say I’m a huge fan of that as it bloats the file count without really adding meaningful information.
It’s true that it distinguishes between a song that has no synced lyrics yet and an instrumental song that never will.
However it also removes the distinction that a song with .lrc file has synced lyrics, while one without does not.
And for the player it doesn’t really change much either. You don’t see lyrics in either case and I personally don’t need an “instrumental symbol” telling me that.
There’s also the question whether to add the [au: instrumental] as a .txt or an .lrc file. Since it does not contain a timestamp, .txt would make more sense than .lrc imho.
I don’t think adding (in my case) tens of thousands of files that only contain [au: instrumental] would be worth it to see an instrumental symbol for instrumental songs.
All that being said I don’t think supporting it is a bad idea as there are clearly people who want to use it. I’ll probably just write a script that checks if any .lrc or .txt files in my library only contain [au: instrumental] and deletes those in case some sneak in over time.
