SMI to LRC
Or paste subtitle text
What this conversion changes
5 things are dropped or need a decision
- Timing
cue end times (the output format only records when a cue starts)
- Styling
all styling (bold, italic, colour, outline, shadow)
- Positioning
on-screen positioning (every cue returns to the default position)
- Precision
timing precision — the output's clock is coarser, so every timestamp is rounded to the nearest 10 ms
- Format-specific content
content the source format keeps outside its cues (non-cue blocks, header text, per-cue settings, commented-out events) — the target format has no place for it
This list comes from the capability matrix for these two formats, not from the particular file you loaded. A specific file may lose more if it uses features the format allows but the matrix does not model.
This page converts SMI to LRC. Drop a file in — or paste the text — and you get the LRC version back. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.
These two formats do not store the same things, and the difference is not cosmetic: timing, styling, positioning, precision and format-specific content have nowhere to go in LRC. The list above comes from what the two formats can each express rather than from your file, so it is the same answer before you load anything.
One file is fine, and so is a whole season: the queue works through them in order and the results come down together as a single ZIP.
Examples
A typical SMI file, converted to LRC
Input
<SAMI>
<HEAD>
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
<!--
P { text-align: center; font-family: Arial; }
.ENCC { Name: English; lang: en-US; }
-->
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<SYNC Start=1000>
<P Class=ENCC>Hello there.
<SYNC Start=3000>
<P Class=ENCC>
<SYNC Start=3500>
<P Class=ENCC>How are you?<br>Fine, thanks.
<SYNC Start=6000>
<P Class=ENCC>
</BODY>
</SAMI>
Output
[00:01.00]Hello there.
[00:03.50]How are you?
[00:03.50]Fine, thanks.
Dropped in this output: timing, styling, positioning, precision and format-specific content. Everything else matches line for line.
The same conversion on an awkward input
Input
<SAMI>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Episode 1</TITLE>
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
<!--
.ENCC { Name: English; }
-->
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<sync start="00:00:02,500">
<P Class=ENCC>Line one<br>Line two
<sync start=9000>
<P Class=ENCC>Tom & Jerry
<SYNC Start=12000>
<P Class=ENCC>
</BODY>
</SAMI>
Output
[00:02.50]Line one
[00:02.50]Line two
[00:09.00]Tom & Jerry
This is the kind of damage real files have — mixed line endings, stray whitespace, fields left empty. Compare it with the tidy example above to see what the parser forgives.
Frequently asked questions
What happens to the end time of each SMI cue?
LRC records when a line begins and nothing else — a lyrics player keeps a line up until the next one starts, so an end time would be redundant. Every end is dropped and every SMI start is untouched.
What happens to bold, italic and colour from SMI to LRC?
LRC stores no styling of any kind, so all of it goes: an `<i>` or `<font color="…">` written into the paragraph text, or a rule in the head's `<STYLE>` block — none of it has anywhere to land, and every line is written as plain text. The words themselves are untouched.
What happens to the on-screen position from SMI to LRC?
LRC cannot say where a subtitle is drawn, so the paragraph attributes and the CSS they point at are dropped on the way out of SMI, and every cue goes back to the default position the player chooses — the bottom of the frame, centred, for most of them.
Why have the timestamps moved from SMI to LRC?
LRC stores time as `[00:04.12]` where SMI stores it as `Start=4126` — a hundredth of a second against a thousandth — so every timecode is rounded to the nearest 10 ms: 00:00:04,126 comes out as 4.13 seconds. Nothing is stretched or reordered and no cue moves by more than 5 ms, but if you are lining these subtitles up against another file, that is the one place this conversion stops being exact.
What happens to SAMI's `<STYLE>` block, `<TITLE>` and `Class=` attributes in LRC?
They are dropped. SAMI says what its subtitles look like outside the text of the cue: a `<STYLE>` block of CSS for the paragraphs, a `<TITLE>`, and the channel marker each paragraph carries — `Class=ENCC`, which points at one of those rules. LRC stores cues rather than a document, so there is nowhere for any of that to go. Emphasis written inside a cue's own text is unaffected — that belongs to the line — and the cues come through with their text and timings whole.
What does the output look like when SMI becomes LRC?
Like LRC: no cue numbers: every line carries its own bracketed timestamp. Every SMI cue becomes one LRC cue, in the same order, with the same text.
How does a two-line SMI cue come out in LRC?
As two timestamped lines carrying the same time, which is how LRC says 'these two belong together'. The pairing survives — the two SMI lines still belong to one subtitle in the LRC output, and a player shows them together.
Do SMI cues keep their order in the LRC output?
Yes, and they are sorted by start time on the way — earliest first, which is how every format here expects them and how players read them. If your SMI file listed its cues out of sequence, the LRC output puts them back in order; that is a change to the file's structure rather than its content, and it is deliberate.
Can I convert the LRC back to SMI?
Yes, and it has its own list: converting LRC to SMI drops timing. That list is different from the one above because the two formats keep different things.
Does the LRC output keep the SMI file's encoding?
No — the output is UTF-8, with Unix line endings and no byte-order mark, whatever the SMI file used. A file that arrives in UTF-16, or in a Windows single-byte encoding, is decoded on the way in (the result panel says so when that happens); what comes out is always the same UTF-8 LRC.