Recitation

From ZekrWiki

Zekr supports playing Quran recitation in different formats such as MP3, OGG or SPEEX

Recitation, in Quranic term is the art of singing Quran. It's known as a Quranic art. Most famous reciters used to be from Egypt. Zekr has a powerful recitation support with pre-fetching, progress bar/seeking, multiple aya reciting, delaying, and playing special items like Audhubillah and Bismillah. Zekr first introduced recitation support in Zekr 0.6.5. Recitation scheme then fully re-designed in Zekr 0.7.5 beta 1, and had small changes and enhancements till now. This article is about the new format, introduced in Zekr 0.7.5 beta 1. If you have an older version please check out the older version of this article.

There are two types of recitations: online and offline. Offline recitations are full archive of audio files which are installed on your computer, so you can play them even if you are offline and not connected to the Internet. But in order to play online recitations, you should be connected to the Internet.

How to install a recitation

Add a recitation

You can add any Zekr resource either for me-only or all users. If you add them as me-only, they are not visible to other user accounts on this computer. In this case resources are copied to your workspace directory (which everyone naturally has write access to). You should be administrator or have write access to Zekr installation directory in order to install a resource such as recitation for all users; otherwise you may prompt with Permission denied errors.

Install offline installation

You can see a demonstrated tutorial on how to add an offline recitation pack to Zekr here

1. Download recitation file (.recit.zip) from the list of our offline recitations.
2. Add your .recit.zip file through Tools > Add > Recitation (*.recit.zip). It takes a few minutes to unzip the whole recitation archive on your system.
3. Open audio player form (F4) or use Audio > Recitation menu to select your newly installed offline recitation.

Install online recitation

1. Download recitation file from the list of our online recitations.
2. Add your .properties file through Tools > Add > Recitation (*.properties).
3. Open audio player form (F4) or use Audio > Recitation menu to select your newly installed online recitation.

Play scope

You can configure play scope

Using play scope button in the audio player form, you can configure Zekr to play in different scopes: aya, sura, page, hizb quarter, juz and continuous. For example if aya is selected, it only plays a single aya when play button is pressed, and if page is selected, will play until last aya of this page is reached. If you select continuous it plays as much as possible until reaches the last aya of Quran.

Shortcut keys

If you don't like current audio player form, you can close it and do whatever you like with shortcut keys. Here are a list of shortcut keys:

• Play and pause (Ctrl+P)
• Stop (Ctrl+S)
• Seek forward/backward (Alt+Shift+Right/Left), only works for offline recitations
• Volume up/down (Ctrl+=/-)
• Play next/previous (Ctrl+Alt+=/-)
• Toggle audio player form (F4)

You can customize Zekr shortcut keys if you like.

Special items

You can configure Zekr to play Audhubillah, Bismillah and Sadaghallah in three modes: 1. Always, 2. Smart and 3. Never. Here is the description of the three playing modes for these special items. It can be configured through Tools > Options > Audio.

Audio options allows to specify playing mode for special items.

• Audhubillah:

1. smart: will be played only once the system is up as the first playing item.
2. always: will be always played if current aya is 1 of any sura, or before playing the first item when system is up. If this item is selected, bismillah will act as 'always', and will be played after audhubillah in the first aya of a suras but sura 1 and 9.
3. never: never plays this item.

• Bismillah:

1. smart: will be played only when player automatically goes from the last aya of the previous sura to the first aya of this sura.
2. always: will be always played if current aya is 1 of any sura but suras 1 and 9. Bismillah will be played after audhubillah (if any). Setting audhubillah to 'always' will force 'always' mode for bismillah.
3. never: never plays this item.

• Sadaghallah:

1. smart: will be only played after 114:6 is played and it's in a multi-aya playing scope (any playing scope other than 'aya').
2. always: will always play sadaghallah after reaching end of this playing scope (only in multi aya playing scopes).
3. never: never plays this item.

Technical details

Recitation format

Zekr has a straight forward format of recitation packs. There are currently two formats: .properties (may be online or offline) files and .recit.zip files (offline, which also contains a recitation.properties inside it). You can see a full detail of Zekr recitation format in this article.

Important notes for package providers

If you are using basic jar files provided by Zekr packages, and you want to run Zekr and play .ogg audio files, be very careful with classpath entries order. vorbisspi-1.0.3.jar should always come before tritonus-jorbis-0.3.6.jar; otherwise Zekr .ogg files cannot be played.

In order to play ogg files, you should either keep the classpath entry order as told above, or, use tritonus_share.jar instead of trinonus_share-0.3.6.jar in your classpath. Zekr has tritonus_share-0.3.6 by default, so you should replace it with tritonus_share.jar, downloaded from http://tritonus.org/plugins.html. If you replace it, the ordering issue resolves as there is no more dependency to tritonus-jorbis-0.3.6.jar. You can play .ogg files with tritonus_share, vorbisspi-1.0.3.jar, and jorbis-0.0.17.jar.

See also

• Recitation format
• How to add recitation