Vedas are the fundamentals on which the sanatana dharma is based on. Vedas are also known as Sruthi or Amnaya. Sruthi means that which is heard. In the ancient times, the vedas which originated by itself (swayambhu) let themselves to be heard by the rishis who were doing penance. Thus, even those rishis are not the authors of the vedas. There are four Vedas: the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda. Each Veda has been subclassified into four major text types – the Samhitas (mantras), the Aranyakas (rituals), the Brahmanas (commentaries), and the Upanishads (philosophy). In the olden days, the vedas were transmitted through oral tradition unlike the present days in which there are written manuscripts. Intonations are very important while reciting the vedas as different tones may attribute different meanings to the same mantra. The upward, downward and median tones (swaras) are termed udaaatta, anudaatta and swaritha respectively. To elucidate the point
I stumbled upon a great online resource for Hindu spiritual resources. In fact the majority of the site is in malayalam. But there is a lot of content in English too. You can download a lot of ebooks, audio and videos which are of excellent quality. What I liked the most is the excellent satsanga audio resources which can be downloaded. Nowadays it is very difficult to find satsanga sessions and listen to the vedic wisdom. Information technology is helping to cover up the distances by enabling us to download and listen to the great spiritual gurus. The site is maintained by Sreekandakumar Pillai (Sree). He had worked with Infosys Technologies at offshore and various foreign locations. Later he quit his full-time job and founded Zetta Technologies and working as a project manager and blogger. The english version of the site can be accessed at the following link. Link: http://sreyas.in/