Those tend to be shut down by the recording companies' lawyers. Google is decent if you hear a piece of a song that's reasonably well known. I'm sure we'll have Google Lyrics (TM) soon enough.
My experience is brutal popups, ads, and even spyware from the googled sites. I suspect they are quasilegal. There are, as said above, copyright problems.
My experience is brutal popups, ads, and even spyware
Stop using Internet Explorer.
Yeah, lyrics sites are always full of popups and spyware. Click on the Google cache link instead to avoid that junk.
This thing (which I haven't used) claims to be able to automatically look up lyrics to your mp3s. Combined with MusicBrainz (which I have used, and is very good) you could probably lyricsify your music collection pretty easily.
Doesn't help much for songs you want to look up but don't possess a copy of, of course. Which, unless the lyrics to the song are really unintelligible, is probably the problem that actually needs solving.
nah, what we really need is a way to transliterate sounds into words, so we can search for them on the internets. You know, what's the name of that song, the one that goes, 'den den den, den den da-den, den den den, den-de-den?'
That's Shostakovich's Symphony #10.