I just discovered that leopard's version of spotlight is now able to index and search the lyrics stored in your itunes library mp3 files. I specified mp3 because - for reasons completely obscure to me - this doesn't work with m4a files, a format that apple seemed to be pushing a while ago. unfortunately, some 20% of my collection is indeed m4a, so I'm thinking about converting to mp3, because the capability is too delightful to me... unless some little tweak from apple comes in some future 5.x revision.
by the way, the indexing function is perfectly realtime as with most spotlight searches: push ok in the lyrics tab and the spotlight results page will change.
update: I started to poke around with mdls* a little to see if it's possilbe to force the ©lyr atom to be indexed by spotlight, but strangely mdls used on an mp3 file with lyrics doesn't list any lyrics, even if they are in the file and they are actually indexed because spotlight gives the results. so now I don't have any idea on how apple implemented this...
update x2: a little more digging and I discovered that the proper spotlight prefix for lyrics is 'intext', so if you put into spotlight search:
intext:"Pay for the light"
you'll obtain an exact phrase search of your mp3 lyrics. without the intext: prefix the exact phrase search won't work for lyrics.
* the terminal command that lists all metadata that will be indexed by spotlight for a particular file.
by the way, the indexing function is perfectly realtime as with most spotlight searches: push ok in the lyrics tab and the spotlight results page will change.
update: I started to poke around with mdls* a little to see if it's possilbe to force the ©lyr atom to be indexed by spotlight, but strangely mdls used on an mp3 file with lyrics doesn't list any lyrics, even if they are in the file and they are actually indexed because spotlight gives the results. so now I don't have any idea on how apple implemented this...
update x2: a little more digging and I discovered that the proper spotlight prefix for lyrics is 'intext', so if you put into spotlight search:
intext:"Pay for the light"
you'll obtain an exact phrase search of your mp3 lyrics. without the intext: prefix the exact phrase search won't work for lyrics.
* the terminal command that lists all metadata that will be indexed by spotlight for a particular file.