The all new Lilac Writer rhyming lookup was quietly released to our growing team of beta testers a couple of weeks ago. We haven't talked about this much yet except for a few hints on Twitter. I encourage you to take it for a test drive.

First of all, I want to mention that the rhyming look-up is not quite complete. There are many, many forms of rhyme and we are adding support for more of the extended and near rhyme forms every day now. You will find some great, useful and interesting rhymes for most one and two syllable words. Actually, lots of longer words will return great results as well. We will turn on the support for triple rhyme shortly.

The Lilac Writer rhyme dictionary is different. It is designed specifically for songwriting. Lilac Writer will return the perfect rhymes you expect. The biggest innovations in Lilac rhymes are the handling of the various forms of near rhymes.

Let's take a closer look at perfect rhyme. Perfect rhyme for a one syllable word by has:

1. The same vowel sound
2. The same ending consonant sound
3. A different beginning constant sound

Perfect rhyme list example: scene/clean/mean/screen

Most rhyming dictionaries do a pretty good job with perfect rhyme. Perfect rhyme is extremely common in songwriting. When an end rhyme is perfect, it provides a tight sonic connection between lines of a song. This is great if your song idea needs a tight connection AND you can find a rhyme that fits the meaning of the song.

The perennial problem with perfect rhyme is that there aren't that many matches for most words in English. This can lead you using very cliched rhymes like sky/fly or love/above. Millions of songs have been written over the past couple hundred years. The most obvious, singable perfect rhymes have been used and abused. Using cliched rhymes is a great way to make your song sound amateurish.

The remedy for this problem is to extend your search beyond perfect rhyme to family rhyme. Family rhyme for a one syllable word has:

1. The same vowel sound
2. A similar ending consonant sound
3. A different beginning constant sound

Example of family rhyme matches for "scene":
scene/dream/team/theme/

The Lilac Writer rhyme look up will give you a great selection of family rhymes along with other types of near rhyme like additive and subtractive. These choices will help you write lines with a connection very close to perfect rhyme but avoid overusing cliches. Even better, you don't have to compromise the meaning of your lyric just to make an end rhyme work.

The concept songwriters come back to again and again is "prosody." Do all of the elements of the song support the idea and emotion behind the words? If the lyric is about a concept that where there is doubt or an unresolved emotion, then many songwriters deliberately choose a weaker connection between lines. One of our goals is to provide near rhymes with various levels of sonic connection.

Starting with the word "night"

• -- TIGHT CONNECTION--
• Perfect rhyme: light
• Family rhyme: hide
• Additive rhyme: rights
• Subtractive rhyme: shy
• Assonance rhyme: eyes
• --WEAK CONNECTION--

This list is ordered from the tightest rhyme to the weakest. I bet most of you could write a song section using that list in about five minutes! All of these forms of rhyme are useful and extend your options to words you might not have considered before.

That is a brief introduction to the new Lilac Writer rhyme look up. Try it out. Look up some words for your latest song or re-write!

Happy (and prolific) songwriting!

Bill

As you edit your lyric, Lilac Writer will automatically save your work every 30 seconds. This new feature just works silently in the background.

Autosave will help you avoid loss of work if you lose your connection, power off without saving or something glitches on your computer. When you log back into Lilac Writer, your work will be recovered to the last autosave as if nothing went wrong!

Even if you have your lyric shared with 5 members of your band, autosave protects each writer with 30 second saves.

You can see the time of the last autosave in the time display in the upper right as edit any lyric.



Autosave is another step toward making Lilac Writer the songwriting and collaboration tool of choice by more songwriters everyday!

Bill

We have added a simple timer to the sidebar reference tab. There are useful preset times of 2, 5 and 10 minutes for timed writing.

Using Timed writing is simple.

1. Open either your ideas tab or or lyric for editing
2. Open sidebar if it is closed
3. Select the reference tab
4. Click one of the preset times for your timed writing.



A message will come up at the end of the time frame announcing the end of your timed writing session. We have chosen the most useful timed writing options based on our research and we would love to get some feedback on how this works for you.

This can help you get your ideas moving forward. The concept is to focus on an area of your lyric then start the timer and come up with as many ideas as possible with no editing. This is really what the ideas tab in each lyric project is for. Start with the song concept or title and write for 10 minutes. During that 10 minutes just write freely but incorporate as much sensory information in your writing as possible.



After your free write, look for ideas or potential words to use in your lyric. Now you might have more ideas for your second verse or the chorus. Maybe you have developed more backstory.

Now, you clearly don't need a software feature to do this. If you are writing in your notebook, you can use the timer on your phone (the iPhone has a nice count down timer). However, with Lilac Writer we want to keep what you need handy so you have less resistance to stay productive and become prolific!

Happy songwriting!

You might have noticed a steady stream of minor improvements in Lilac Writer over the last few weeks. Here are the highlights.

To-dos.
We always had actions to create lists of to-do items for your lyric projects. However, many didn't understand what "actions" were for, so we changed to the much more common term to-dos. To-do types now have both auto-complete and clickable links to make entering To-do items faster and easier.

Checked-off to-dos.
One problem users were reporting was that the list of checked off, completed to-do items would grow really long. To help with this, to-dos that are more than a couple of days old are not shown. You can easily see them by clicking "View all completed items" at the end of the to-do list.

Title Generator.
It started as an Easter-time Easter egg and was so popular, we made it into a permanent feature! When you are in a lyric project you will find the title generator in the sidebar on new the Reference tab.

There are also a few major features we introduced over the past month. If you haven't used Lilac Writer in a while, you might have missed these great new features!

Files.
You can now edit or add a description to files even after they are uploaded. This along with new YouTube links and the MP3 player, files have become indispensable. The content of your files are also easily referenced from the sidebar.

Sharing.
You can now share your lyric with other Lilac Writer users. This is a big new feature. Check it out on the Sharing tab in each lyric project.

Comments.
You can add a running dialog of comments about each lyric. It is great for keeping your own writing journal. It is even more powerful when you are sharing your lyric with a co-writer. Entering comments can automatically email any or all collaborators to keep the momentum going on your project.

Let us know how you are using the improved and enhanced Lilac Writer! There is nothing to download or install, just Login at
www.lilacwriter.com!

If you have friends or co-writers that would benefit from using Lilac Writer, let us know and we will send them an invitation to the expanded Beta program!

Happy Songwriting,

The Lilac Writer Team

You can now add YouTube content to the Files tab in your lyric projects!

Open any of your Lyrics and click the Files tab.

You will find a new link "Add YouTube Content".



You can put in the YouTube ID and a description. Every YouTube video has an ID. For instance this Eric Clapton video.



The idea is at the end of the address. In this case, it is "fX5USg8_1gA".

After you have the YouTube ID of the video you want to link to, click "Add YouTube Content" on the files tab. Copy in the YouTube ID and type in a description if you like.



Click the Add YouTube Content button.

The video will be right there on the files page! You can click play and watch it from there. This is a great way to add reference video or even your demos recorded on YouTube into your Lilac Writer project.

You can even reference the video form the sidebar while writing your song!

Note: Some YouTube videos won't play when linked like this if the owner doesn't allow it. For those you can click the YouTube icon to watching right on the YouTube site.

This is a great new feature with lots of uses. Many songs start by referencing artists or songs and YouTube can be a great resource. It is also pretty easy to record audio and video directly into YouTube which can be great for adding your own content!

This is another great feature that comes from all the feed back we have received from the beta team!


Happy Songwriting!