Scroll to the song, not to a guess
Download Song Hive and let your library sync itself to the music.
Auto-scroll that's locked to the song, not to a guessed speed. Each lyric line hits the page midpoint exactly when it's sung — and the chord sheet scrolls with it.
Auto-scroll has always been steady — you pick a speed from 0.25x to 4x and the page moves at that pace. The problem is that the right speed depends on the song, the verse, and how slowly the bridge breathes; songs that hit you hard on the chorus need a different pace than the half-time verse before it, and you usually only find out mid-song.
Synced auto-scroll fixes that by lifting timing data straight off LRCLIB's time-stamped lyrics. Each lyric line carries the second at which it's sung, and Song Hive interpolates a virtual playhead through them — line one at 0:12, line two at 0:17, line three at 0:21. As you play, the page scrolls so the line being sung sits at the vertical midpoint of the screen. No speed guess. No drift. Just the song, scrolling in time.
When you add a song that's on LRCLIB, Song Hive pulls the synced lyrics in alongside the plain text automatically. For older songs in your library that already have lyrics but no timing data, the Lyrics tab shows a small Sync pill — tap it and Song Hive fetches the timing in place. Your existing lyric text is left untouched, even if you've edited it.
Once a song has synced data, a small clock icon appears next to the Lyrics tab label so you can see at a glance which songs in your library are sync-ready — without playing them to check.
Chord sheets are usually written as chord-line / lyric-line pairs — the standard Ultimate Guitar layout. Song Hive lines those lyric lines up against the synced timing and, if the alignment's clean, drives the chord-tab scroll from the same playhead. Each chord-and-lyric pair rolls past the page midpoint exactly when it's sung, with the chord changes landing where you'd expect.
When the chord sheet diverges from the synced lyrics — repeated choruses written once, instrumental sections, a URL-only chord field — Song Hive notices and quietly falls back to fixed-speed scroll instead of getting the chord changes wrong. No mode switch, no error message; you get whichever mode actually fits the song.
Even with the song lined up, the first line needs to sit still long enough for you to read it before it disappears. Synced scroll holds the first line at the top of the screen and waits for the playhead to reach the page midpoint before the page starts moving. The play button pulses while the pre-roll is running so you can see scroll is about to kick in, and the timing flows naturally from the first lyric's timestamp — no separate setting to tune.
At the other end of the song, the last line lands at the midpoint instead of the bottom, so you read the closing line in the same place you read every other line.
Drag the page mid-song and Song Hive treats it as a manual reposition — the time baseline re-anchors to whichever line you dragged to, so when you let go it carries on from there. Drag back to the top and the pre-roll re-arms for the first line.
Need a more familiar speed-stepper? On the play page, the auto-scroll bar reads Synced with a clock icon when timing's driving the scroll, and the +/- buttons hide because they're not what's controlling it. On any song without synced data — or when synced alignment fails for the active tab — the bar's back to the regular 0.25x to 4x stepper.
The synced-lyrics data travels with each song through iCloud, so a song you imported on your iPad lands on your iPhone already timed. Shared .songhive files carry the timing too — AirDrop a set list to a bandmate and the synced songs stay synced on their copy.
Download Song Hive and let your library sync itself to the music.