www.vaishnavsongs.com. Some web sites are simple and easy to use, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful and won’t keep you coming back for more. Vaishnavsongs.com is a simple catalogue of songs, but is so useful you will come back often.
Songs are an essential part of the practice of bhakti; we use them when worshiping the deities in the temple, when offering food to Krishna, and when remembering and honoring the acharyas. Singing these songs is an act of devotion, and as this web site reminds us, they transport our consciousness to higher levels of love of God. Vaishnavsongs.com contains a large collection of audio and video of all your favorites and more.
Everything you need to find your way around is along the top menu bar. Wherever you are in the site the first tab, Home, will always bring you back to the beginning.
The next tab, Song List, will take you to the main song list, containing hundreds of titles in alphabetical order. You can browse through the songs here to find ones you know by name, or check out ones that catch your eye. Each song title is a link to view the page where the song can be found in its original language and in English.
If the song in the list has a picture icon of a CD with a musical note against it, this means there is a link to an audio file on the song page that you can listen to or download to your computer. Some songs have a number of tracks available by different devotees.
If the song in the list has a picture icon of a filmstrip against it, this means a video of the song is available for you to watch.
At the bottom of each song page is a set of social-media buttons that allow you to share the song with your friends on any of your social-media sites, or by email. There is also a link, “Download pdf,” that you can click on to copy the song to your computer.
On the right side of the page is a box titled Related Songs, which shows you other songs available from the same author or source.
The next tab along the menu bar, Categories, takes you to a list of the songs by type or theme. The Composer tab lets you view the songs by the name of the author.
The Download tab gives you a link to copy to your computer a songbook that contains many of the songs in the site. The Audio tab lets you view all the songs with sound files, categorized by composer, and the Video tab lists the available videos by song name.
The last tab on the menu bar, Search, allows you to quickly find a song with a predictive search feature that finds the names of songs similar to the text you type.
—Antony Brennan