# Lyrics plugin quality

**URL:** <https://discourse.beets.io/t/lyrics-plugin-quality/270>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [January 21, 2018, 6:51am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/lyrics-plugin-quality/270 "2018-01-21T06:51:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![firewater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9a140/32.png) [@firewater](https://discourse.beets.io/u/firewater)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2018, 6:51am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/lyrics-plugin-quality/270/1 "2018-01-21T06:51:53Z")

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I’ve just removed all the lyrics tags from my collection. I had obtained them from a foobar2000 plugin that fetched them from all sorts of sources. The reason I removed them is that there was a lot of garbage text, a lot of non-standard stuff, like lyrics starting with

> [Artist: The Beatles] [Song: A Day in the Life]

or worse, just absolute garbage text like

> lyrics lyrics kent hagnesta hill lyrics find

Which were obviously the result of the foobar’s google plugin failing to find a decent match and just forcing its way into whatever came up first.

My question is - how much better is the beets plugin for lyrics? I’m particularly interested on whether I should enable the google source or not. I have a lot of obscure music I suppose the mainstream sources won’t have in their database, but I also really don’t want garbage text like that in place of the actual lyrics ever again.

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**Author:** ![dorade](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b3f665/32.png) [@dorade](https://discourse.beets.io/u/dorade)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2018, 10:34am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/lyrics-plugin-quality/270/2 "2018-01-21T10:34:18Z")

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My config is

```
lyrics:
     auto: yes
     google_API_key: [redacted]
     fallback: ''

```

and I never get garbage.

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**Author:** ![firewater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9a140/32.png) [@firewater](https://discourse.beets.io/u/firewater)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2018, 12:18am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/lyrics-plugin-quality/270/3 "2018-01-22T00:18:14Z")

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Cool! I’ll take your word on it. Just wanted to have some sort of reference before running it on a large collection.

Not sure I understand the `fallback: ''` option, though. From the documents:

> fallback: By default, the file will be left unchanged when no lyrics are found. Use the empty string ‘’ to reset the lyrics in such a case. Default: None.

If I want to `lyrics` tag to be written if no lyrics are found, should I have that or not?

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**Author:** ![adrian](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/adrian/32/4_2.png) [@adrian](https://discourse.beets.io/u/adrian)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2018, 12:51am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/lyrics-plugin-quality/270/4 "2018-01-22T00:51:25Z")

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You’ll want to set that to `''`.