Annotated lyrics database?

[eyeofnoob]

What I’m trying to do

So I am incapable of just enjoying things and so have decided I want to create lyric databases of my favourite artists and albums. I’d like to be able to annotate them and also link them together by theme so that at a glance I can see what themes emerge from which artists and also click through and see the lyrics that apply. Any suggestions? I was thinking of boxes and hashtags.

[blue_emperor]

In Obsidian there are no distinct ways to add inline annotations and then query them for later review. You have to use complicated custom syntax to define (inline) annotations. It has to be said that you can do annotations naturally with pdf files—why to bother making it more complicated than that? See this guide how to do annotations with Zotero pdf reader.

You can use Zotero to manage pdf annotations and then manually export them to Obsidian. Then in Obsidian you can convert raw text to links. Your notes can use this template:

---
artist: 
url: 
tags: 
---
![[file.pdf]]
## Annotations

Properties are optional but you could make stronger interplay between Zotero and Obsidian by generating a local Zotero url. See this video. Properties are useful if you want to query items from Obsidian based on properties [property] or [property:value]. You can also use properties to filter nodes in graphs.

[writtenfool]

• It sounds like you want to enjoy lyrics even more with this project.
• Check out the use of Properties in Obsidian
• I’m assuming your annotations would be at the tune level and not for each line of the lyrics. What other annotations come to mind? Those that would search criteria in your analysis.
• If it were me:
  • add some more properties at the top of each note - song_name, theme, tempo, message … as many as you might ever consider tracking. It is important to identify these up front as you’d have to go back and modify each song if you add more later.
  • learn about folder templates and a plugin called Templater - create a folder called songs. You can setup templates so that if you create a new note in that folder, templater will automagically add the properties section at the top of each note - all you have to do is tailor them to the song.
  • avoid using pdf’s - just bring the lyrics in as pasted text in each note. Each note = one song.
  • If you’re new to Obsidian, learn how to use built in search. If you want true analytics, learn about a plugin called Dataview. It has a bit of a learning curve, but is powerful.
• Best wishes, let us know how your doing; ask away, there’s decent helpful folks in this space. This is a great idea and I’ve not seen it talked about.

[writtenfool]

I really didn’t answer your question:)

For in line annotation I use the highlight markdown syntax: “==inline annotation==” and it formats nicely. I can place it in line or, for me, at the end of verse block, for example a them of ==lonely== .

For lengthier annotations use callouts. There pretty cool and quite powerful.

With regard to hashtags, those would be properties of the type “tags”.