Frequently asked questions

Lyrcs is a lyrics editor for songwriters, on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. As you type, it counts the syllables on every line and highlights every rhyme, so the rhythm and rhyme scheme of your song are visible at a glance. It also includes a built-in rhyming dictionary, real-time rhyme suggestions, custom near rhymes, annotations, and notes, and it stores your songs as plain text files.

Lyrcs is for anyone writing lyrics, poetry, or rap: songwriters working out a melody's syllable count, rappers tracking multi-syllable rhymes, and poets shaping meter and rhyme. It suits both quick idea capture on your phone and serious writing on a Mac.

Lyrcs runs on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Each is a real native app built for its platform, so the Mac app feels like a Mac app and the iPhone and iPad apps feel at home too. Your songs stay in sync across your devices through iCloud.

Yes. Lyrcs works fully offline. The editor, the syllable counting, the rhyme highlighting, and even the rhyming dictionary all run on your device, so you can write on a plane, a train, or anywhere with no signal.

No. Lyrcs opens straight to a blank page. There is no sign-up and no account to create. If you use iCloud, your songs sync across your devices automatically, but that is optional.

No. Lyrcs has no ads and never will. There is nothing competing with your words for your attention while you write.

Lyrcs counts the syllables in each line automatically and shows the number beside every line, updating live as you type. You never have to count on your fingers, and you can see the syllable shape of the whole song at once.

Yes. If you pronounce a word with a different number of syllables than Lyrcs expects, you can set a custom override, and Lyrcs remembers your choice everywhere that word appears.

Yes. Every line shows its own count at all times, not just the line your cursor is on, so you can compare lines and keep a verse or chorus consistent.

Lyrcs gives matching rhymes the same color the moment you type them, using a palette of twenty distinct colors so even dense, multi-rhyme passages stay readable. The colors are chosen to stay distinguishable for people with color blindness. You can choose whether highlighting looks only at the last word of each line or at every word on any line, so internal rhymes light up too.

Near rhymes (also called slant or half rhymes) are words that almost rhyme. Lyrcs lets you teach it your own: tell it that two words rhyme, like "home" and "alone", and it will highlight them together from then on, no matter how different they sound.

Yes. Lyrcs has a rhyming dictionary built into the editor, so you can look up rhymes for any word without leaving the app or opening a browser. It works offline and you can filter to common words.

As you type, Lyrcs suggests rhymes for the word at your cursor in real time, right where you are writing. You can also select any stretch of text, even part of a single word, and get rhymes for exactly that, which is useful for matching one syllable inside a longer word.

Annotations let you mark up your lyrics without affecting the counts or colors. You can label sections like [Verse] and [Chorus], write chords inline, and leave comments to yourself. The syllable count and rhyme highlighting ignore all of it, so your annotations never throw off the numbers.

Notes are a scratch pad attached to each song for alternate lines, ideas, and anything else you want to keep with the lyric but out of the main text. They travel with the song.

Yes. Every Lyrcs song is an ordinary .txt file you can store locally or in iCloud and open in any other app on any platform. Your words are always yours, never trapped in an app's own format.

Yes. You can print your lyrics or share them as a PDF, so you can take a hard copy to a session or send a clean version to a collaborator.

Yes. You can scale the text to whatever size is comfortable, and Lyrcs supports dark mode so it is easy on the eyes day or night.