Overview

The Oud Tutor allows music playback from MIDI files, and from the proprietary MZ* files (*.mzf, *.mzt, *.mzp). In The Oud Tutor, music-file playback has the following features:

• While the music plays, the corresponding oud fingering is animated on the oud in real-time.
• The user can control the playback speed. The desired speed applies to both sound and fingering animation. The user can change the speed at any point during the playback.
• The music files that come with The Oud Tutor (and those downloaded from The Oud Tutor site) have maqam changes encoded in them. When a file is played back, the maqam changes will be reflected on the oud and will be indicated in the Maqam panel.
• A MIDI file can be filtered for playback in 2 different aspects: sound and fingering animation. Sound filtering selects specific channel(s) for sound playback. Animation filtering can filter out some channels from fingering animation although their sound is still played.
• The played music can be transposed by a whole number of octaves up or down.
• When playing an MZ* file, the user can view the sheet music of the played piece.
• The user can control various aspects of how fingering positions and fingering animation are shown on the oud.

Using the Playback Features

The following figure shows the controls and indicators of the File-Playback panel.

Open Button: Use this button to select and open a music file.

Channel-Filter Button: Use this button to select which channels of an opened MIDI file are to be played, and from among those, which channels will have fingering animation. Note that quite often, a MIDI file has multiple channels, usually each has a different instrument. These channels have parallel musical events. If all these events are animated on the oud, the user may get overwhelmed and confused by the many fingerings that occur at the same time. This would defeat the purpose of the fingering-animation feature. Channel filtering for sound and fingering-animation provides a way for overcoming such situation.

Sheet-Music Button: Use this button to view the sheet music of the current music file. This works only for MZ* music files (*.mzf, *.mzt, *.mzp).

Play Button: This is used to play the music file. By default, The Oud Tutor starts playing the file as soon as the Play button is clicked. The user can change this behavior by specifying a time for The Oud Tutor to wait before starting to play. To set delayed starts, select Delay Start from the Options menu, and select the desired delay.

Pause/Resume Button: This pauses playback, or resumes a paused playback.

Stop Button: This stops the playback.

File Time Length: This is the time length of the music file, in a format "minutes : seconds". For example, "002:45" means that the length is 2 minutes and 45 seconds.

Playback Position: This indicator shows the current time position during playback. It slows down or goes faster with the playback speed so that at the end of the playback it becomes equal to the file time length.

Position Slider: This slider shows the current playback position. Besides, It can be used by the user to jump to another playback position, forward or backward.

Speed Indicator: This shows the current playback speed relative to the normal speed. For example, x2 means that the current playback speed is twice the normal speed.

Speed Slider: The user uses this slider to change the playback speed. The speed can be changed on the fly while playback is going on.

Octave-Shift Indicator: This shows the number of octaves by which playback is shifted relative to the original music.

Octave-Shift Control: The user uses this control to shift (transpose) playback by a whole number of octaves relative to the original music. Sometimes, a MIDI file might have music that goes below or above the tuning range of the oud. One way to get the music to be played in the oud tuning range is to shift its playback up or down. Another way is to shift the oud tuning itself.