What Is an LRC File? Synced Lyrics (2026)

The one-paragraph version

An LRC file is a text file. Open one and you will see lyrics with a bracketed timestamp in front of every line:

[00:12.40]I heard there was a secret chord
[00:18.10]That David played and it pleased the Lord

The player reads the timestamps and highlights each line as its moment arrives. It is one of the simplest useful formats in existence — invented in the late 1990s, never meaningfully changed, and still the thing every music player understands.

The format, in full

Timestamps are [mm:ss.xx] — minutes, seconds, hundredths. A line may carry several if the same words repeat, and lines do not have to be in order, though every sane tool writes them that way.

Metadata tags sit at the top and use the same brackets with a letter key:

[ti:Song title]
[ar:Artist]
[al:Album]
[offset:+500]

offset is the useful one: a positive value shifts every lyric later by that many milliseconds, a negative value earlier. If a whole file is consistently half a second out, fix it here rather than editing 60 timestamps.

Enhanced LRC: word by word

Standard LRC highlights a line at a time. Enhanced LRC adds per-word timings inside the line, using angle brackets:

[00:12.40]<00:12.40>I <00:12.68>heard <00:12.95>there <00:13.20>was

This is what produces karaoke-style highlighting that moves through a line as it is sung. It is a superset — a player that does not understand the angle brackets simply ignores them and falls back to line-level sync, so an enhanced file is safe to use everywhere.

Where lyrics actually live

Two possibilities, and it matters which one you are dealing with:

• A sidecar file. Song.lrc sitting next to Song.flac, matched by filename. Easy to edit, easy to lose when you move files around carelessly.
• Embedded in the tags. Written into the audio file itself — the USLT frame for unsynchronised lyrics or SYLT for synchronised, in ID3; equivalent fields in Vorbis Comments and MP4 atoms. Travels with the file, harder to edit by hand.

Sidecar files are more common in the wild because more tools write them. Embedded lyrics survive a library reorganisation. Most good players read both.

Making one

There is no way around listening to the song and tapping. Automatic alignment exists and is unreliable enough on real music — instrumentals, ad-libs, repeated choruses — that hand-correcting the output usually takes longer than tapping from scratch.

We build two free browser tools for this, and neither uploads your audio anywhere:

• LRC Maker — paste the lyrics, play your file, tap once per line, export the .lrc.
• Word-by-Word LRC Maker — the same thing at word granularity, producing Enhanced LRC.

If you need the lyrics as video subtitles instead, LRC to SRT converts between the two, including the timestamp shifting that the two formats express differently.

LRC in Trove

Trove reads both sidecar .lrc files and embedded lyrics, displays them synced, and handles Enhanced LRC word-by-word highlighting. That is all in the free app. Tap-to-sync editing inside the app — playing a track, tapping along, and having Trove write the timings — is part of the one-time $9.99 unlock, as is the floating desktop lyrics window on the Mac.

Related terms

• FLAC — the format most libraries with careful lyrics are stored in
• Gapless playback — the other thing that separates a music player from a file player
• WebDAV — keeping lyrics and music together on a server