While driving today, I had a thought about Emphatic.

Okay... There is a lot to be said for making sure that the lyric tag is actually part of the MP3 file, and having Emphatic do a proper read of a proper lyric field of a proper V2 tag. This is the "right" way to do it. Currently, Emphatic Does The Right Thing in this respect.

But...

What if there were another way Emphatic could get its lyric data? Just as an extra feature, not really its main intended mode of operation. What if it could do this:

- Current FID playing is, let's say, fid number Fd30. (I never remember whether the *0 files or the *1 files are the actual MP3s or not, but it's not important for this example.)

- Emphatic checks that FID to see if it's got an embedded lyric tag. If it does, it reads that data out of the tag and uses it as its source for the lyric data.

- If the FID does not have an embedded lyric tag, then it does this new thing. Which is: Look for a file named Fd3L in the same folder with Emphatic. That file is a loose lyric file, just the ascii text and the time entries. Same file that you'd use as the source file for adding the lyrics to an MP3. It's just loose, it's not part of the MP3. If the file is there, Emphatic uses that as its source for the lyric data.

For those who don't have lyrics already on their player, then it just means renaming the files and FTP'ing them up to the folder with emphatic. It saves the step of tagging the songs and replacing them on the player.

Now, I see a problem here, which is... what if the FIDs change as you delete and shuffle songs around on the player. Yeah, that would be a problem, which is why the preferred method is still to actually tag the MP3 file The Right Way. But for just messing around, or for those who are willing to be careful about which files they've got lyrics for, it would be an easy way to add lyrics to the player quickly and easily.

Maybe there's an even better system that could be coordinated with Jemplode or something, better than having to look up FIDs and rename lyric files. But this was just the initial wild thought I had. Is this a good idea or a dumb idea?