LRC to SRT Converter

What is inside an LRC file

LRC is the lyrics format music players use to scroll words in time with a song. It is plain text, and the file normally sits next to the audio with the same name, so song.mp3 pairs with song.lrc. Each lyric line begins with a time tag in square brackets, [minutes:seconds.hundredths], and the top of the file may hold information tags such as [ti:] for the title, [ar:] for the artist, [al:] for the album, [by:] for whoever made the file and [offset:] for a timing correction in milliseconds.

The format was built for music players, not video. SRT, the format editors, TVs and video players expect, needs a start and an end for every subtitle. That gap is what the converter fills.

How to convert LRC to SRT

1. Drop the .lrc file into the box above. Files saved with a .txt extension work too, as long as the lines start with time tags.
2. Read the file card: it shows how many subtitles were made and when the last one ends. The notes below it say whether an offset was applied and whether word-by-word timing was removed.
3. Look over the first lines in the preview, paying attention to the end times.
4. Under "Save as", take SRT for video players and editors or WebVTT for a web player, then press "Convert and download" to get the lyric lines as subtitles.

A short example

Here is a small LRC file:

Line 1

[ti:Harbour Lights]

Line 2

[offset:+250]

Line 3

[00:12.40]Lanterns on the water

Line 4

[00:16.90]Calling us back home

Line 5

[00:21.10][00:52.10]Hold on, hold on

Line 6

[00:48.00]The tide is turning

It becomes five subtitles:

1

00:00:12,150 --> 00:00:16,650 Lanterns on the water

2

00:00:16,650 --> 00:00:20,850 Calling us back home

3

00:00:20,850 --> 00:00:28,850 Hold on, hold on

4

00:00:47,750 --> 00:00:51,850 The tide is turning

5

00:00:51,850 --> 00:00:55,850 Hold on, hold on

Four things happened. The title tag was dropped, since SRT has nowhere to put it. The +250 offset moved every line a quarter of a second earlier. The chorus line, which carried two time tags, became two subtitles at the right moments. And the third subtitle stops after eight seconds instead of waiting until 47.75 seconds for the next lyric.

Where the end times come from

Each subtitle ends when the next timed line begins, because that is when a music player would move on too. Two limits stop that rule from producing odd results in a video:

• No subtitle stays up longer than 8 seconds. In a song, the gap before the next line is often a guitar solo or a long instrumental passage, and a lyric frozen on screen for 25 seconds looks broken.
• The last line gets 4 seconds, because nothing follows it.

These values are fixed in the converter. To end a line earlier at a specific moment, add an empty time tag to the LRC before converting: a line such as [00:24.80] with no words makes the previous subtitle end at 24.8 seconds and creates no subtitle of its own. Many LRC files already contain these blank stamps for breaks, and they are honoured.

Repeated lines and the offset tag

Choruses are often written once with several time tags in front, one for each time the line is sung. The converter creates a subtitle for every tag and sorts everything by time, so a chorus written once at the top still appears in each place it is sung.

The [offset:] tag shifts the whole file by a number of milliseconds. A positive value makes the lyrics appear sooner, a negative one later, and the converter applies it to every start and end time, then notes that it did. If your lyrics were already corrected some other way and now look early, delete the offset line and convert again. For a correction after conversion, shift subtitle timing moves every subtitle by the same amount.

Enhanced LRC and word timing

Some files add a time in angle brackets before each word, such as <00:12.40>Lanterns <00:13.05>on <00:13.30>the, so players can highlight words as they are sung. SRT can't time individual words, so the converter removes those word stamps, keeps the words and keeps each line's start time. The notes tell you when this happened. A line that has only word stamps and no line tag at the start isn't read, because the converter needs the line's time tag.

Turning the SRT into a lyric video

With the SRT in hand, you can put the lyrics into the picture. Open the music video and the SRT in the free subtitle editor, adjust any line on the timeline, pick one of the 8 style presets or 19 fonts, choose a colour, a background box and a position, and render an MP4 with the lyrics burned in. The lines appear and disappear whole: the editor applies one style to the entire video and doesn't do karaoke-style word highlighting or animation. Rendering needs Chrome or Edge 94+, Safari 16.4+ or Firefox 130+ on a computer. Burning subtitles into a video explains the choices in more detail.

If you plan to show the lyrics in a second language, translating song lyrics in videos covers why sung lines are harder to translate than dialogue. This converter only changes the file format; it never translates.

No LRC file yet?

If you have the song or video but no lyrics file, the AI subtitle generator can transcribe the vocals into SRT, in 100 languages, at 1 credit (0.1¢) per minute with a minimum of 5 credits per file, so a four-minute song costs 5 credits (0.5¢). Sung words over loud instruments are harder to recognise than speech, so read the lines through before using them. To turn that SRT, or any other, into a lyrics file for a music player, use SRT to LRC.

Limits

• One file at a time, text only, up to 20 MB.
• The 8-second cap and 4-second last line can't be changed here; adjust individual lines afterwards in the editor.
• Information tags (title, artist, album, author) are not carried into the SRT.
• If accented or non-Latin letters look wrong in the preview, the file isn't UTF-8; re-save it with the subtitle encoding converter first.