Words that move in time with the music are the difference between singing a song and reading one. Here is where those timings come from, why a search comes back empty for a track you know perfectly well exists, and what to do when the words turn up but the timings do not.
A plain lyric file is just the words. A synced one carries a clock alongside them, and there are two kinds worth telling apart, because they behave differently on screen.
Line timing is the common one. The file holds one timestamp per line, so the display knows that this line starts at 1:14 and the next at 1:19. The whole line arrives at once and sits there until the next one replaces it. This is what most people mean by synced lyrics, and for singing along it is usually enough.
Word timing is the richer kind, sometimes called enhanced. Every word inside the line carries its own timestamp, so the line can fill in as it is sung rather than flipping over all at once. It is the difference between knowing which line you are on and knowing which syllable you are on, and it matters most in exactly the places where a singer gets lost: long held notes, and lines where the words are crammed against the beat.
Not every song has the second kind, and a file that has it is still perfectly usable if your reader only understands the first.
Somebody typed them. That is the whole answer, and it is worth sitting with, because it explains most of what follows. There is no machine listening to your song and working out where the words fall. There are people who have done that by hand, song by song, and put the result into public catalogues that anyone can search.
Homeoke uses LRCLIB, a free, open catalogue run independently of us. A lookup sends four things: the title, the artist, the album name and how long the track is. It sends nothing about you, no account, no device identifier, and never the audio itself. Your music does not leave your phone to have its words found.
This is the part that makes people give up, and almost always the song is in there. The lookup just did not recognise it.
If you are searching by hand, the fix for most of this is to give less, not more. Title and artist, spelled the way the original release spells them, and nothing else. Drop "remastered", drop the featured artist, drop the bracketed suffix.
Plenty of songs have their lyrics written down somewhere and have never been timed by anyone. That is not a dead end. Untimed words in front of you are still far better than no words at all: you can follow them with your eyes, and after a couple of passes through a song you know where you are anyway.
Homeoke keeps and shows untimed lyrics for exactly this reason, as a static block rather than pretending to a sync it does not have. Words you can see beat words that scroll to the wrong place.
One last thing, if you ever paste lyrics in by hand. Text made on Windows, and text copied from a lot of websites, ends its lines with two invisible characters rather than one. Anything that splits on only the second of them leaves the first behind, and you get what looks like a blank line between every single line of the song.
The lyrics are fine. The splitting is wrong. If you see that doubling, it is almost never the song.
Homeoke looks the words up when a song is first added, keeps them on the phone so the request is never repeated, and lets you search again by hand if the first attempt found the wrong take. If nothing turns up at all, you can paste the words in yourself. And because the words sit alongside the key control and the range of the original vocal, you can see what the song asks of you and read the line you are on at the same time.
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