Read on for a tip using pearLyrics to get lyrics for songs on an external hard drive when you lack a home internet connection.
If you have your MP3s on an external hard drive, but you don't have an internet connection at home, you can still get lyrics for those songs without bring the hard drive with you to a spot with internet access. Here the method I use:
- Connect your Mac to Internet (i use my iBook at a free hotspot).
- Open iTunes (if you use multiple libraries, check the tip above before proceeding). Don't worry about the "!" that will appear in front of the titles of your tracks; you are not going to listen to them anyway.
- Create a playlist, name it No Lyrics or whatever else, and put the tracks you need lyrics for into it.
- Open pearLyrics, select the No Lyrics playlist and run it: pearLyrics will search the lyrics for you, and it will save them as text files in a folder named lyrics, located in your user's Library -> Application Support -> pearLyrics folder.
- When pearLyrics finishes its job, close it.
- When you go back to home, plug your external hard drive in and wait until it mounts on the desktop.
- Open iTunes (if you closed it) and load the same library you previously loaded.
- Open pearLyrics and run it again on the No Lyrics playlist: now pearLyrics will write the lyrics it found and saved when you were connected into the MP3s (using the Lyrics tag).
[robg adds: Sadly, pearLyrics is no longer available from the developer, thanks to the heavy-handed tactics of the music industry. However, if you're the enterprising sort, you can probably figure out where to download a copy. Note that it is not a Universal binary, but that it seems to run just fine on my Intel Mac.]

