Given the choice, I feel the current method is the more appropriate one, and I say that as someone who uses time stamped lyric sheets (non PDF) for over 95% of my band's songs.
My primary reason for that assertion comes down to the amount of control you have in each scenario.
If you are manual scrolling, you are liking doing it in sub-second 'flicks' of a finger on a screen, with limited control, while performing live as a musician (quite possibly with 2 hands on an instrument). You need to know that your lyric sheet can't scroll past the end of the lyric sheet otherwise you risk the very likely scenario of swiping/flicking too hard and scrolling your lyrics off the screen entirely.
If you are timestamping, you are in a position of control. You are determining what is happening (triggering/displaying/highlighting), and when, down to the millisecond. You aren't (hopefully) ever touching the iPad screen. If you need the last line of the lyric sheet to display in a certain position on the screen, you can do that (by adding blank lines as previously mentioned).
Is it a pain in the arse to have to go and add blank lines to your existing lyric sheets? Manually, yes.
A quick AI prompt for a script (take your pick - Microsoft Copilot (which uses GPT), ChatGPT, etc.) throws up something that will append X number of blank lines to the end of all the txt files in a folder:
import os
# 🔧 Set your folder path here
folder_path = 'path/to/your/folder'
# 🧾 Define the blank lines to append
blank_lines = '\n' * 6
# 📁 Track how many files we've updated
file_count = 0
# 🚀 Loop through files in the folder
for filename in os.listdir(folder_path):
if filename.endswith('.txt'):
file_path = os.path.join(folder_path, filename)
# ✍️ Open the file in append mode — this ensures existing content is untouched
with open(file_path, 'a', encoding='utf-8') as file:
file.write(blank_lines)
file_count += 1
if file_count >= 50:
break
print(f"✅ Successfully added 6 blank lines to {file_count} .txt files.")
Please note, I haven't tested it, it's just to show what is possible.
I just opened Copoilot and prompted:
Can you write a script that will add 6 blank lines to the end of 50 txt files in a folder. The txt files already have content in them, I need to ensure it will add the blank lines AFTER the existing content, and not affect the existing content in any way.