Lyrics on the Mac live inside apps. Apple Music has them, in its own window, for Apple Music. Spotify has them, in its own window, for Spotify. A song playing in a browser tab has none at all. And none of them are where your eyes are, which is on the thing you are working on.
The Lyrics droplet puts them in one place for everything: beside the song in Droppy's media widget, a hover away at the top of the screen, following the music line by line. When the Mac is locked, the same lines run on the lock screen under the artwork.
What it looks like
The panel is a calm reading surface rather than a karaoke screen. The current line sits in the middle at full strength, the lines around it fade out above and below, and the whole thing moves smoothly as the song advances instead of jumping. It takes its colours from the artwork, so a dark album gets a dark panel and a bright one does not look pasted on.
It borrows the companion widget's place rather than adding a new window, so your shelf layout is untouched. When the song ends or you close the panel, the widget you had comes back.
The L badge beside the title in the media widget opens the lyrics panel next to the player, replacing the companion widget until you close it.
The expanded Now Playing panel on the lock screen has a lyrics button. It swaps the artwork for centred timed lines, with a soft halo around each letter so they stay readable over motion artwork.
Anything the media widget can see: Apple Music, Spotify, and music in a browser, including YouTube, where Droppy cleans up video titles to find the song.
The same lyrics, in the three places you look at while music plays.
Where the lyrics come from
Droppy asks LRCLIB, a free, community-built library of time-synced lyrics that anyone can use without an account. It sends what it needs to find the song, which is the title, the artist, the album and the length, and nothing about you.
Finding the right song fast is most of the work, so Droppy asks two ways at once: an exact lookup for the track, and a looser search for when the metadata is slightly off. Whichever answers first with synced lyrics wins, and the other request is cancelled. Native players usually hit on the first try.
Browsers are harder, because a video's title is not a song's title. "Artist - Song (Official Video) [4K]" is not what a lyrics library files things under. When the first lookup finds nothing, Droppy reads a title in that shape, strips the video suffixes, and tries again with the artist and song on their own.
The lyrics of the last thirty songs are kept in memory, so going back to one does not ask again. A slow or failed network request is retried quietly; a clear "no synced lyrics for this song" is taken as the answer, so Droppy does not keep asking a free service the same question.
Honest limits
The badge only appears when timed lyrics exist, because the whole point is following the song. Plenty of tracks have them; new releases, live versions and very niche music sometimes do not, and then there is simply no badge. Instrumentals have nothing to show. And the lyrics are only as good as the community's copy: if a line is off, the fix belongs at LRCLIB, where it helps everyone who uses it.
Switching the droplet off stops every lookup. A Droppy without the Lyrics droplet never contacts lyrics servers at all.
Updated for Droppy 16
Since this was first published, the lyrics have followed Droppy into two new places. When Droppy shows what a paired Apple TV is playing, the L badge works for that song too, so the living room's music comes with its words. And Droppy for iPhone shows the lyrics of what your Mac is playing.