Interesting. I guess that Plex is not that keen of having people downloading lyrics from ‘somewhere’ (actually, just like Apple Music doesn’t…) except, of course, the ‘official’ way (whatever that might actually be).
I mean, it’s been eight years (or almost) since this request was first put here to the vote! It’s not as if Plex doesn’t know how to extract the lyrics from all possible formats; after all, they already do that for all the other tags; it’s just a one-liner really. And they certainly could leave the existing .txt-based lyrics active as well — generating it from scratch the first time the library is scanned and finds the new file, for example, as I suggested on my own feature request (which is now linked to this older request).
The alternative, of course, would be to reinstate user-programmed plugins — which I suppose were dropped for security/safety reasons, and/or blatant copyright violations (aye, even lyrics are protected by copyright, just like the audio tracks themselves, even if sometimes the ownership may be different).
However, modern CDs are often pressed with the lyrics already embedded in them; when ripping the CD with, say, FLAC, the lyrics will be automatically embedded in the audio file — like, indeed, a few of us have already commented here.
Therefore, I can only conclude that this feature has not been implemented for commercial reasons: Plex prefers to continue to sell access to a private service for the lyrics (which they can safely rely upon, in case of litigation…) than to ‘risk’ having their users violate copyrights. That said, it means that those among us who actually love to pay for their CDs to sponsor their favourite bands/artists, and therefore have legitimacy to make a personal backup of everything (at least, well, under the copyright laws of Continental Europe), are left out of the loop, just to prevent others from committing potential copyright violations.
But if that’s really the case, why allow using .lrc or .txt files instead? This means that if anyone has grabbed the lyrics from ‘somewhere’, they still can add them anyway — but it’s so much more cumbersome that way!
It took me this whole day to extract all the lyrics from 53 tracks on a 5-CD-album (well, a few tracks had no lyrics — two, I believe) and properly format them to be recognised by Plex…
