Date:13/07/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/07/13/stories/2008071355221200.htm
Front Page Your own jukebox on the Web! Anand Parthasarathy Bangalore: Guruji, a pioneer among Indian search engines, has launched a new site where one can look for songs across the gamut of Indian recorded music, covering almost all languages and dating from 1923 to the present ( www.guruji.com/music). Harnessing the same web crawler technologies, which made their flagship search engines so popular, the makers have created a starkly simple portal which allows one to enter a search term: the name of the song or the singer, the film, even the actor or actress. The results include different versions of the song from the original (often unobtainable on CDs or DVDs today) to recent remixes or instrumental versions. To test the breadth of search results, this correspondent entered some nostalgic 'requests' across genres: Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan, brought very clean recordings of the original sound track version sung by Mohammed Rafi and Geeta Dutt in the 1956 film 'CID'; likewise Choopulu Kalasina by Ghantasala and P. Leela in the 1957 Telugu version of 'Maya Bazaar', or T.M. Soundararajan singing Yarrukaha in 'Vasantha Maligai' (1971). Vayalar's immortal lyrics for 'Periyarey' in the 1962 Malayalam hit 'Bharya' still sound great in the original, somewhat scratchy, sound track version by A.M. Raja and P. Susheela, though so many 'remixes' were also available. The search crawls more than cinema songs: Priye paha by Chota Gandharva, a classic of Marathi 'natya sangeeth,' will bring back memories of the great singer for those fortunate enough to have heard him live at the Bharat Natya Mandir in Pune in 45 years ago. Guruji has found this rare track at a portal, 'Dhingana', which has a large Marathi semi-classical repertoire. There are a thousand web resources for today's tunes and beats. Guruji's music search tool does not ignore them; but by delving far and deep to tag those precious musical moments from half a century or more ago, it will provide users with many nostalgia-filled music hours. One hint: most sites come with their own music players; but some require the latest versions of RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. It is worth while to download and keep both of them on your desktop to save time. Join Access India convention: For updates on it visit: http://accessindia.org.in/harish/convention.htm Registration is now open! To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
