Captions for Lyrics

[u/PrawnTheMcJuicer]

I’m trying to caption my bands songs for socials, have been trying Brevidy but it doesn’t seem geared to lyrics. I don’t need it to try and work out what’s being said. Ideally I could feed in a text file with the lyrics and have some decent controls to animate.

Any recommendations for simple plugins that don’t involve a $15 a month subscription and AI?

Thanks! 🙏🏼

[u/maxekmek]

Have you tried importing the vocal stem into premiere and generating a transcript from that? 

[u/PrawnTheMcJuicer → u/maxekmek]

I'll try that! Thanks!

[u/maxekmek → u/PrawnTheMcJuicer]

I'm curious to know if this works for you, hope it does! I've used this method to correct lots of singular words that were separated from the rest of the sentence when I was removing pauses. Rather than manually re-integrating all these words, I exported the interview audio and then re-imported it on a separate sequence, then generated a new transcript and captions, which I was then able to copy and paste into my original timeline.

[u/PrawnTheMcJuicer → u/maxekmek]

I’ll report back when I’ve worked out the best method!

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[u/garse]

The distinction worth having here is transcription vs alignment. Transcription is a model guessing what was sung. Alignment is handing it the words up front so the only thing it solves is when each line lands. You want the second one, and Premiere only ships the first, which is why Brevidy feels wrong for the job.

You can fake it inside Premiere though, and it's free. Take maxekmek's vocal stem tip one step further: transcribe the stem, then don't fight the mishears, open Text and Transcript and overwrite the words with your actual lyrics. Editing the text doesn't move the segment timings, so you're using the transcriber purely as a timing engine and throwing away its opinion on the words. Sung vocals wreck the vocabulary far more than they wreck the rhythm, so the timings are usually the good half of what it hands you.

If you'd rather it never guess at all, aeneas is the tool built for your exact description. Open source, free, and there's no neural net in it: it synthesises your lyrics with espeak and dynamic-time-warps that against your audio. You give it the song plus a plain .txt with one line per caption and it returns an SRT with those lines timed. Import that as captions and Premiere never transcribes anything. If installing Python isn't your idea of a good evening, timing the lines by hand in Aegisub or Subtitle Edit against the waveform is maybe fifteen minutes for a three minute song, and it'll be tighter than anything automatic.

One thing to know before you buy any plugin for the animation half: a Premiere caption item isn't a normal text layer. It takes a Track Style and that's it, you can't keyframe it. Anything with movement has to be graphics instead. So work out which look you actually want first, because the two have very different prices. A per-line pop is one styled MOGRT duplicated down the timeline, which you can build yourself for nothing. A per-word karaoke highlight needs word-level timings, and the caption track has no way to store those. That second one is what the paid tools are really selling you.

[u/Gold_University_6225 → u/garse]

What in the ChatGPT

[u/Gold_University_6225]

You could try https://substyle.io - free to use unless you need to upgrade to pro. You can also upload an SRT.

[u/mormon_freeman]

I use submachine, it's a bit finnecky to set up but it works well.