but, what exactly is dunce?

quick history of dunce

about a year ago from today, i started working on a little frontend for genius. called better-genius, that app was, honestly, dogshit. but, it managed to be miles ahead of the actual interface of genius.

then i gave it a name: Dunce – the opposite of genius. this is the first version that actually starts to resemble modern day dunce. i bought a domain for dunce some time in march of 2025. shit got real.

what is dunce like now?

dunce is currently, in my opinion, the best way to browse lyrics. but we're not stopping there. lyrics is only part of the music experience, after all.

today, dunce is a (hopefully, sometimes, maybe) stable app you can rely on for quick lyrics. it's still actively maintained, though new features have slowed down. how much can we improve lyrics after all?

the plan for dunce

music is meant to be fun. giant music companies are trying to squeeze the fun out of music and earn as much as possible (and they're doing a bad job at that too; spotify only started being profitable in 2024).

we think software should be easy and pleasant to use. when you ask your music player to play your favorite playlist, you expect just that. not some shitty ad trying to upsell you to Music Player Ultra Pro Premium Plus to see less ads.

dunce does not, never has and never will include ads. it's a passion project funded through frustration.

more than just lyrics

dunce currently consists of two finished released projects: dunce (or dunce-lyrics) and dunce-parser (the underlying api for fetching and parsing responses from lyrics apis).

the team behind dunce (me, the only developer + angel who does a little bit of everything), is currently working on a new project. Dunce Music Player (Dunce Player, or dunce-player) is the music player you deserve.

we'll share more on the music player when it's ready.