News

Nov 17, 2022

At the long last, the site's backend has been revamped and brought up-to-date with current versions of software components. As a user, you will not immediately see many changes. Actually, since its inception in 2008, nothing much has changed from the looks of the site. The site content (new songs, etc.), of course, has always been growing.

A notable new feature for the user is the 'Settings' icon, where you can select how your songs should be displayed. You have the choice of selecting to view lyrics in Sinhala, in Singlish as well as viewing the chords or scores (the latter yet to come). Guest comments are again enabled - after 5 years of absense! I have included two convenient buttons for you to look for YouTube searches for the song and for a kareoke version of the song.

Dec 12, 2013

LankaSongBook now contains more than 1500 songs! Fulfilling a request by many fans, I have started adding guitar chords. Chords for most of the 'party' songs have already been added. Chords for remaining songs will be added gradually. A new feature 'Collections' has also been introduced. If you want to make your own collection of songs, please follow the instructions in that section.

Apr 13, 2013

Geustbook is again open for your comments. Sometime in February, I had to shut down the guestbook because of a giant spamming attack. It is again open for your comments. I have introduced a Captcha field so (hopefully) only humans can write comments!

Dec 18, 2012

LankaSongBook is now running on a new platform. You will notice that some of the features are missing. These include 'View in Unicode', 'LankaSongBook for Small Displays' as well as the 'sumihiri to unicode' converter. These will come back soon again.

On the positive side, the guestbook is now native. Also there is a new feature to change the key signature of all songs by a certain number of semitones. The musicians will hopefully enjoy this. The 'Like' button at the center of the heading allows you to tell others that you like the site.

There are many more novel features coming up. Please stay tuned.

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

• Where is the submenu that should come after selecting Songs by Name?

It is probably hidden in the top panel. You can either scroll down or, better, make the top panel taller by moving the separator line between the top panel and the others.

• How can I print a song?

Don't print ;-) ! Really, my hope is that people will not have to print lyrics any more because they have them all easily accessible using a computer. Anyway, you may want to print the lyrics for a certain purpose. There are several ways to do this. It depends on the browser you use. In Firefox you can use right mouse button to display the lyrics frame on a separate window. Then you can use 'Print' from menu. Also keep in mind that the lyrics here are actually images. So, for example, in Internet Explorer, again using right mouse button, you can request to 'Print Image'. Of course, you can always save the image and print it using whatever program you use to view images. Someone asked for a way to print a set of selected songs. I will have to work on that.

• It would be nice to show artist/lyricist/musician information along!

I agree. If you click on the icon beside the song entry you will see that and other information about the song. You will however notice that most of that information is currently missing. My first focus was to get the lyrics in place. Please send me those details if you know!

• How do I search for a song?

In many cases, searching a song is the fastest way to locate a particular song. The search is done only on the name of the song. Just type a text that is part of the song name and press the GO! button (try entering 'malak', for example). However, there is a catch - you have to enter the text in the sumihiri notation.

• I can't understand the way the song entries are sorted!

Song entries are sorted using the English alphabetical order of the song names which, however, are represented in the sumihiri notation. One somewhat surprising result is what you see under 'Z'.

• The pitch (base chord) you give is useless! It is too high.

Sorry about that - but the good news is that if you find the key too high for one song, it will most likely be too high for all other songs by the same amount. So figure out by how much it is too high (a note, two, ...) and you should be able to apply the same change to any other song. Hopefully this works. Do similarly if the given pitch is too low, too.

• Why not use Unicode fonts? Using Unicode would make downloading faster!

A lot of people don't have Unicode fonts installed. I myself have trouble using them on my Linux system. I haven't seen nice looking Sinhala fonts either. So I had to make a decision early on and my conclusion was that I should use images generated by my SLaTeX package. In the future, when Unicode fonts become common and we have a choice of good fonts, I will use them.

• Some songs don't appear in all relevant categories, why?

While putting songs in categories is subjective, I must admit that in some cases even 'obvious' inclusions have not been made. Please note that this is work in progress. I give highest priority to presenting the lyrics. With time, I will include songs in their 'relevant' categories. This also means that you may not find a song that you have been looking for in its category but if you look it up under 'name' you might find it.

• Base chord of some songs are missing? When can we have them?

Again, this is work in progress. My highest priority is to provide the lyrics. With time, I will have them available.

• It would be really nice if you would include complete set of chords instead of just the initial chord!

I have no plan to include all the chords in a song. (I do have a plan to include the set of chords for a song but not the points at which they change.) If you are looking for complete chords, Sinhala Song Chords may be a good site for that.

• Who is the creator of this web site?

My name is Sarath Camillus Jayewardena. Some of you might actually know me: with or without 'Sarath', with or without 'Camillus', with or without beard, ...!