Free lyric video maker

How to make a lyric video in three steps

Start with the final mix of your song and the lyrics as you want them on screen. Break long lines into the phrases you sing, one per line: a line of eight to ten words is easy to read, a whole verse in one line is not. Section labels like [Chorus] are skipped for you.

Then tap. Play the song and press the button, or the space bar, the moment each line starts. If you miss one, press undo and the song jumps back two seconds. When a line should leave the screen before the next one comes, during a solo or a long breath, press Enter to end it there.

Last, the look. Every style animates the words in a different way, and the preview plays with your song, so you see exactly what the video will be. When it looks right, make the video. Your browser draws every frame and encodes the MP4, usually faster than the song plays.

Syncing lyrics: tapping and fine timing

Tapping along is faster than typing times and it is how many lyric editors work: your hand already knows where the words fall. We take the delay of your speakers into account, so a tap lands where you heard the word, not where the computer played it.

Nobody taps perfectly, so the timeline is there for the rest. Every line is a block over the waveform. Drag it to move its start, drag its right edge to change how long it stays, click it to hear it from there. For tiny corrections, select a line and nudge it by 10 or 100 milliseconds.

In the video, each line appears on the first frame at or after its start. At 30 frames a second that is within 33 milliseconds of your tap, too small to see. Download the SRT file too, and you can add the same timing as captions on YouTube.

Formats for YouTube, Reels, TikTok and Shorts

Pick 16:9 at 1920 × 1080 for YouTube and most players. Pick 9:16 at 1080 × 1920 for Reels, TikTok and Shorts, where the video fills a phone held upright. Pick 1:1 at 1080 × 1080 for feeds that show a square. The words are laid out for each shape, so a long line wraps on a tall screen instead of shrinking.

The file is an MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio, the pair that plays in QuickTime, in every browser, on phones and on every platform you will upload to. A few browsers have no AAC encoder; there the sound is Opus and we tell you, and the video still plays on the web and in VLC.

Songs up to 8 minutes work. A video background takes longer to make, because each frame of it is read in turn.

Lyric videos and your rights

Use your own song and your own lyrics, or ones you have the rights to. A lyric video of someone else's song needs permission from whoever owns the song and the recording, and platforms find it quickly. That is also why we never fetch lyrics: the words you paste are the only ones used.

If you upload the video to YouTube with your distributor's Content ID on, your own video can be claimed by your own release. That is normal, and you can whitelist your channel with your distributor.

Learn more, or get a person on it

Read the mastering guides, comparisons and data, or send your tracks to an engineer with OBRA ULTRA.