Music · head-to-head
Freesound vs Lyrics.ovh
Freesound's APIv2 lets apps browse, search, and retrieve Freesound's library of user-uploaded sound clips — with content-based similarity search and audio-analysis features on top of plain metadata search — plus upload, comment, rate, and bookmark actions for authenticated users. It supports both token-based key auth and full OAuth2, defaults to JSON responses (XML and YAML are available but untested by the maintainers), and access is free for registered developers. The older APIv1 has reached end-of-life and is no longer available.
Lyrics.ovh is a small keyless lookup service: GET a artist/title pair against api.lyrics.ovh/v1 and it fans that query out in parallel across sources like Genius, AZLyrics, and Letras.mus.br, returning the first full lyric text found as plain JSON. There's no authentication, no request quota, and no dashboard — it's a single open-source Node project (github.com/NTag/lyrics.ovh) that anyone can also self-host. The stored Apiary docs mirror has gone dead (502), but the live API itself responded with real lyrics during this check and sends a wildcard CORS header.
| Freesound | Lyrics.ovh | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | API Key | None |
| Pricing | free | free |
| Formats | JSON, XML, YAML | JSON |
| CORS | yes | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
Lyrics.ovh needs no API key, while Freesound requires API Key — pick Lyrics.ovh to start without signup.