One of the cool things in Windows Phone 7 is the ability for 3rd party applications to integrate themselves into certain hubs. The Lyrics by musiXmatch app shows up as part of the Music + Videos hub and allows you to search for lyrics to a song that you might be listening to. The app was a free download, however it has mysteriously disappeared from the Windows Phone Marketplace. Hopefully, it was only removed temporarily in order to fix some show-stopper bug. Luckily, we’ve still got the original app, and it really works pretty nicely!
UPDATE: We’ve just heard from the developers that they have temporarily disabled this app from the U.S. market because they would like to launch with a new version that will be available when Windows Phone 7 becomes available in the U.S.
If you’re listening to a song in the Music + Videos hub, then launch the Lyrics program, it will recognize the song you’re listening too and search its database for lyrics that match the song. Obviously it’s not always going to find lyrics for every single song you throw at it, but generally it does well with many popular songs. Sometimes, it even loads a cool background image of the artist you’re listening to.
If you launch the app when you don’t have any music playing, you’ll see a list of popular chart-topping songs. You can tap on any of those to load the lyrics, and it will also give you a little “Buy” button that links to the Zune Marketplace so that you can purchase/download that song. Naturally, you can also search for songs manually within the app.
Originally published on Pocketnow on October 26, 2010.