Presentation mode — lyrics on the big screen for the room

Open a song with synced lyrics, go into presentation mode, and everything except the words disappears. The lyrics scale up for reading from across a room, the phone unlocks from portrait so you can turn it sideways to fill a 16:9 screen, and the display stays awake because nobody is going to be holding it. Mirror it to a TV and you have a karaoke screen built out of your own files.

The short version

• Needs a song with synced lyrics — an .lrc/.srt file or embedded SYLT.
• Landscape roughly doubles the type size. Portrait is about 1.6×.
• Controls stay hidden until you tap, so the room sees only lyrics.
• The screen will not sleep while it is open.
• Works over AirPlay screen mirroring or an HDMI adapter. No network needed for the music.

Setting it up

Get lyrics onto the song first. Presentation mode has nothing to show without them. Drop the .lrc in beside the MP3 and import them together — the lyrics guide has the detail. Unsynced lyrics display but do not follow the music, which is fine for a lyric sheet and no use for a singalong.

Open the song, then presentation mode. From the Now Playing screen, go into the lyrics and switch to the full-screen view.

Turn the phone sideways. The rest of Refrain is locked to portrait; this screen is the one place rotation is unlocked, specifically so the phone matches the shape of a television. Landscape is the right choice any time it is going on a screen.

Set the size. The A/A stepper adjusts how big the type is. It lives on this screen rather than in the main lyrics view because this is the screen where it matters — pick the size by walking to the back of the room and seeing if you can read it.

Tap to hide the controls. They toggle on a tap and stay hidden until you tap again. There is no auto-hide timer, so the close button never disappears on you mid-song.

Getting it onto the TV

AirPlay screen mirroring is the easy route. Swipe into Control Centre, Screen Mirroring, pick the Apple TV or a compatible smart TV. Whatever is on the phone lands on the TV, which is exactly why presentation mode strips everything else away — any chrome on screen would be on the TV too.

An HDMI adapter works and is more reliable in a venue with bad Wi-Fi. A Lightning or USB-C to HDMI adapter, a cable, done.

Sound. The music keeps playing from wherever you have routed it. Mirroring sends audio to the TV as well, which is usually not what you want in a room with a PA — send the audio out separately and use the mirror for pictures only.

Worth knowing: the audio itself never needs a network. Only the mirroring does. If the Wi-Fi drops mid-song the music keeps going and the picture is what you lose.

Who this is actually for

Nothing else in this category has this, and the people it suits are not the people who usually get catered to.

Rehearsals. A band working up a set, with the words up where everyone can see them instead of four people looking at four phones.

Worship and community singing. Your own recordings, your own arrangements, the words on the wall. No licence server, no internet, no subscription — which matters in a hall with no signal.

Classrooms and language groups. A song, the words, and a line at a time. Language learning with synced lyrics goes further into that.

Karaoke from your own catalogue. If you make music, this is how you play it to a room and have people sing along to something that has never existed on a karaoke machine.

Parties. A phone on a stand, propped against a laptop, doing the job of a screen.

Practical things that go wrong in a room

The phone rings. Do not present from your own phone if you can help it, or turn on Do Not Disturb first. This is the failure everyone experiences once.

The battery. The screen is on, bright, and not sleeping. Plug in.

The timings drift. LRC files made by hand are sometimes a beat off. You can edit the timestamps directly in the file with a text editor — a line reading [00:12.40] is just minutes, seconds and hundredths — and re-import.

The lyrics are wrong for the mix. If you have several versions of a song, the LRC pairs by filename, so the extended mix needs its own file with its own timings.

What this doesn't do

It is not a second-screen system. There is no separate output where the phone shows controls and the TV shows lyrics — the TV shows what the phone shows. That is why the screen is stripped bare rather than helpful.

It does not generate timings. You need a timed lyrics file. Making one is a different job; TuneMason exports .lrc for exactly this.

It has no vocal removal. Refrain plays the file you give it. If you want an instrumental to sing over, that has to be the file you bring.

Related

• Get synced lyrics to scroll with your own music files
• Lyrics on screen for rehearsal and worship
• Learning a language with synced lyrics
• All guides · Refrain