Trying to activate On-the-Fly Translation for the Lyrics plugin, but docs seem out of date

[Phil305]

Hello all.

As title says, I'm trying to enable On-the-Fly Translation, and the docs provide a link to the Microsoft Translator API docs explaining how to create a Translator resource.

Only problem is, the lyrics plugin mentioned entering beets as Client ID in step 3 of a process that I assume is in the docs they link, but there's no mention of needing to set or use Client ID in the docs (and Client ID isn't even a substring in the linked Microsoft docs).

Are the Beets docs for the Lyrics plugin out of date? Or am I missing something?

Thanks!

[snejus]

The docs are indeed outdated and the functionality is broken. It was written in 2016 and has not been updated since while Microsoft APIs changed a lot.

I've recently been working on various lyrics improvements, and I've re-implemented lyrics translation using up-to-date Azure AI translation services. This work is complete but hasn't yet been reviewed or merged into master. You can find it in this PR or in the lyrics-translations branch.

If you want to test it, try installing it with pipx:

# install beets version on this branch
pipx install git+https://github.com/beetbox/beets.git@lyrics-translations
# install additional dependencies required for the lyrics plugin
pipx inject beets beautifulsoup4==4.12.3 langdetect==1.0.9 requests==2.32.3

See the updated configuration and documentation below:

Configuration

To configure the plugin, make a lyrics: section in your configuration file. Default configuration:

lyrics:
    auto: yes
    translate:
        api_key:
        from_languages: []
        to_language:
    dist_thresh: 0.11
    fallback: null
    force: no
    google_API_key: null
    google_engine_ID: 009217259823014548361:lndtuqkycfu
    print: no
    sources: 
    synced: no

The available options are:

• auto: Fetch lyrics automatically during import.
• translate
  • api_key: Api key to access your Azure Translator resource. (see lyrics-translation)
  • from_languages: By default all lyrics with a language other than translate_to are translated. Use a list of language codes to restrict them.
  • to_language: Language code to translate lyrics to.
• dist_thresh: The maximum distance between the artist and title combination of the music file and lyrics candidate to consider them a match. Lower values will make the
  plugin more strict, higher values will make it more lenient. This does not apply to the lrclib backend as it matches durations.
• fallback: By default, the file will be left unchanged when no lyrics are found. Use the empty string '' to reset the lyrics in such a case.
• force: By default, beets won't fetch lyrics if the files already have ones. To instead always fetch lyrics, set the force option to yes.
• google_API_key: Your Google API key (to enable the Google Custom Search backend).
• google_engine_ID: The custom search engine to use. Default: The (https://www.google.com:443/cse/publicurl?cx=009217259823014548361:lndtuqkycfu), which gathers an updated
  list of sources known to be scrapeable.
• print: Print lyrics to the console.
• sources: List of sources to search for lyrics. An asterisk * expands to all available sources. The google source will be automatically deactivated if no
  google_API_key is setup.
• synced: Prefer synced lyrics over plain lyrics if a source offers them. Currently lrclib is the only source that provides them.

Activate On-the-Fly Translation

We use Azure to optionally translate your lyrics. To set up the integration, follow these steps:

1. Create a Translator resource on Azure.
2. Obtain its API key.
3. Add the API key to your configuration as translate.api_key.
4. Configure your target language using the translate.to_language option.

For example, with the following configuration

lyrics:
  translate:
    api_key: YOUR_TRANSLATOR_API_KEY
    to_language: de

You should expect lyrics like this:

Original verse / Ursprünglicher Vers
Some other verse / Ein anderer Vers