Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
G1. What is Sinhalajukebox?
Sinhalajukebox is a library of samples of Sri Lankan Music. In order to increase the usability of the site, we have created a jukebox style user interface where users can create a list of songs/tracks they would like to listen to, and play them in a sequence.
G2. What is the Mission Statement of Sinhalajukebox?
Read our mission statement from the Home Page.
G3. Who created Sinhalajukebox?
Sinhalajukebox, founded around late 1990s and maintained by Vicum, is a sinhala music website created to promote Sri Lankan music mainly among the Sri Lankan expatriate community around the world. Site maintainer would like to thank Jaanaka for his help in
completely redesigning the website during the September/October 2000 timeframe. The site has come a long way since inception, to become one of the most visited web sites even among the internet users in Sri Lanka. The site benefited from many sinhala music
lovers who generously shared their personal music collections with the site. Foremost of these contributors site maintainer would like to thank is Nalin who contributed closer to 6000 songs from his music collection. In addition, please check out the
Thank You page for a list of folks who contributed to this site in various ways. There are many others who would remain nameless yet contributed generously to this site and we thank all of them as well.
G4. How old is Sinhalajukebox and when was it created?
Sinhalajukebox is more than 3 years old as of November 2003. It was first created around late 1990s and then in current format in September/October 2000.
G5. How can I contribute material to Sinhalajukebox?
We welcome voluntary contrubutions of material for publication at site and provide due acknowledgements. In fact Sinhalajukebox would not have grown in to such a large collection without voluntary contributions. Please write to us.
G6. I enjoy the service provided by Sinhalajukebox. Can I donate some money to Sinhalajukebox?
We do not solicit any money for using the service. In fact the site is being maintained with money pocketed out by site webmasters at the moment. However, any voluntary contributions are more than welcome and can be used to offset some part of the costs.
G7. Why do you have advertisements?
See also answer G6. Unlike any other general web site, Sinhalajukebox is a very heavy bandwidth consuming service. Commercial web hosting services charge extra money for heavy bandwidth usage. At the inception of the service, few generous individuals provided us with free web server space and bandwidth. We were stricktly "no advertisements" site back then. But as the site grew in popularity, the high bandwidth requirement could not be obtained for free anymore. We had to decide whether to shutdown the service or move to a commercial web hosting service. We chose to do latter with some money pocketed out. In order to sustain the service we had to find ways to make the ends meet and advertising was the only way out. We ask you to patronise our advertisers as without advertising revenue this service is not self sustainable.
G8. I am interested in Advertising with Sinhalajukebox. How do I proceed?
We provide advertising opportunity from as little as US$10 per month. Please contact us via email.
G9. How can I support Sinhalajukebox?
Patronize our advertisers. They help to keep this site alive. And importantly, support the artists and producers by buying their music. Encourage them to produce more music.
G10. I am a producer/artist and I am interested in publishing my work at Sinhalajukebox. What should I do?
Drop us an email and we will provide instructions on what to do.
G11. I object to having my music played at Sinhalajukebox.
Write to us with details of your claim for the Song Titles concerned and we will remove them from the site. However, our obligation would be for removal of the Songs and any references to them only.
G12. New tracks are very slow to appear on your site whereas they appear very soon at other music sites.
ANSWER1: We are not competing with any other site in providing this service. We rather complement other sites.
ANSWER2: We live outside Sri Lanka. Therefore, we do not get ready access to the latest productions fast. We try our best to keep in touch with the music scene there.
G13. Can I buy the songs in a CD from Sinhalajukebox?
NO. We do not engage ourselves in such activities because we have to protect the interests and copyrights of the artists while providing you with this service. However, you may contact our advertisers who sell CDs and also the individual artists listed in "Featured Artists Section" about buying their music.
Using Sinhalajukebox Site
U1. What are the requirements to use the site?
1. A computer with a web browser and an internet connection
2. RealOne Player (A free version of RealOne player can be downloaded from www.real.com web site). more...
3. Sound Card and Speakers/Headphones connected to your computer.
4. Allow "cookies" in the web browser. more ...
5. Agree to abide by our Terms & Conditions.
U2. How can I start?
1. Click on 'Artists' button or click on one of the categories on the left hand side of this page
2. Then click on 'Compose PLaylist' button
3. Select the songs you want to add to your playlist by clicking on "Add/Remove" button.
4. Keep following the instructions appearing in every page
U3. What is a 'playlist'?
A 'playlist' is a list of songs arranged in an order. Once created, you can play the 'playlist' instead of playing an individual songs. The 'playlist' will automatically play all the songs in it in the order specified without your intervention.
U4. How do I compose a 'playlist'?
see answer U1.
U5. Why do I have to save the playlist in your server?
The next time you visit our site, you can listen to the same 'playlist' you created today if you store the 'playlist' in the server.
U6. How can I delete/add tracks from a 'playlist' already stored in your server?
At the moment we do not have this facility. However, you can send us an email with your desired changes and we will be happy to do it for you.
U7. Do you support any other player than RealOne Player?
No. We have no plans to support other types of players due to technical limitations and bandwidth constraints. Remember this is a "free" service.
U8. How can I download songs from Sinhalajukebox?
You are not authorized to download song tracks from this site and store them in your computer. If you do, you will be violating our Terms & Conditions.
U9. What is 'MyPlaylists' and how does it work?
This feature works by making your web browser remember your favourite 'Playlists' chosen from our database. You need to "allow cookies" in your browser to be able to use the feature. Just click on the button "Add to myplaylists" when you are in a playlist page to store your favourite playlist in your browser. And the next time when you visit our site, you can directly go to "Myplaylists" page instead of having to select playlists from a long list. Send us email if you encounter any problems. Note however that if you change your browser you cannot expect the Myplaylists feature to show your playlists. For example if you store your favourite playlists using your office computer, you cannot retrieve them using your home computer as the actual information is stored in the computer you use.
We are working on a feature which allows you to store your favourite playlists in our server itself. So look out for this feature in the coming months.
U10. Why do you guys write song titles in Sinhala differently?
We have deviced our own transliteration scheme to translate Sinhala words spelled in English in to Sinhala using a single font type. The attempt is not 100% complete, but we have already converted some information so that we can display them in Sinhala on your web browser. This is an on-going process and we hope to one day offer most of our site's content in Sinhala fonts.
R1. What is 'RealOne Player' and why do I need it?
'RealOne Player' is an audio player which can play audio data encoded in RealAudio format. All our song tracks have been encoded in this format and customised for RealOne Player. There is a 'FREE' version of RealOne player with limited features available. The paid version of RealPlayer has more features. If you can afford it, go for RealPlayer Plus at only $19.95
. In addition to listening songs from our site, you would be able to listen to Music Online with 700,000+ Songs at your fingertips with RealRhapsody. However, the free version satisfies the minimum requirements to listen to our site's content.
R2. Where can I get it?
You can get it from www.real.com. Since the layout of their web site can change often, we are unable to give you a direct link to the 'FREE' version of the RealOne Player. Usually a link can be found at the very top or the very bottom of thier web page to download the 'FREE' version. See also ANSWER R3.
R3. When I try to download RealOne player their web site is requesting my Credit Card details?
You have followed the link to download the 'PAID VERSION' of the RealOne Player instead of the 'FREE' version. There is a subtle difference in the terms 'FREE' and 'FREE DOWNLOAD' as used in their web site. 'FREE DOWNLOAD' is the 'PAID VERISON' for free evaluation for a limited period. The 'FREE' version is also called 'BASIC PLAYER'. You may try the following link to get the Free Real Player. We do not know how long this link will remain static. See also ANSWER R2.
R4. How do I configure RealOne Player for Sinhalajukebox?
See answer R6 below.
R5. Newer versions of RealOne Player claims to be able to play better quality sound. Why do not you encode your songs for better quality?
Good question. Our intention is to promote the music by allowing you to listen to samples of music and deliver the content that is usable by listners connecting to internet at different speeds. We have purposely chosen a format with a low bit rate so that anybody can acess the songs with reasonable audio quality but cannot record/reproduce the tracks available here for commercial gain.
R6. Newer versions of RealOne Player cannot play the songs from Sinhala Jukebox anymore?
Users have reported errors when using the newer version of the site specially with RealOne Player Version 10. We discovered that by default RealOne Player Version 10 does not configure itself to play SMIL Presentations. Please follow the instructions below to configure your RealOne Player to be able to listen to our songs.
1. Start RelOne Player and select Tools->Preferences from the menu.
2. Select Content->Media Types under Category as shown below.
3. Click on "Advanced" as shown above.
4. Put a tick mark against "SMIL Multimedia Presentation" as shown below.
5. Click on "OK". Again click on "OK".
6. Done. You would be able to play the songs from now on without any problem.
I1. I always get messages complaining about script errors. Can you fix them?
Different browsers react in different ways to some of the code we have in our web pages. You can safely ignore these error mesages. To disable these prompts in Internet Explorer please use the following steps:
1. Go to Tools --> Internet Options --> Advanced Tab
2. Put a tick mark against the option "Browsing -> Disable Script Debugging" as shown below.
3. If you encounter the following dialog box, then remove the tick mark as shown.
I2. How do I enable 'Cookies' in Internet Explorer 5.x?
1. Go to Tools --> Internet Options --> Security Tab
2. Click on 'Internet' icon and then click on "Custom Levels" button and follow the settings as shown below:
I3. Why cannot I listen to songs any more with Internet Explorer 6.0?
Internet Explorer 6.0 by default does not allow auto page refesh headers, which are being used at this site. Please use the steps 1-6 as shown here to enable this feature. (If you have security concerns regarding turning on this feature you can disable it when visiting other sites. You may want to know that prior versions of IE had this turned on always. We will come up with a different solution in the long run for the site to function without this change.) Once you have done the changes, please close all your browser windows and restart the browser. Also check whether your Real Player configuration is correct: see answer R6.
S1. How can I effectively do a search for Song Titles?
As you know, the song titles are written in English but has to be pronounced with a Sinhala touch. We have tried our best to comply to our Transliteration Scheme to write song titles in English, in a consistent manner, so that their Sinhala Words can be pronounced correctly. However we may still have some incorrectly spelled titles and we are in the process of correcting them.
To get a better hit rate when doing a search follow these tricks (you may click on highlighted phrases to see the examples):
- Use words that sound same when pronounced in Sinhalese. eg: repeat the search for "maala" if you do not find with "mala".
- Use multiple keywords separated by a space character. eg: "mal" would give you a long list, but "mal pipi" would give you a shorter list.
