Jordan O'BrienCasaTunes has officially announced its new call to Muslim Prayer feature (Adhan). Available on both the CasaTunes Music Server and the DIY musicBox 6, Muslim Prayer support is a unique feature giving customers the option to schedule and customise call to prayers. When it is time to pray, CasaTunes stops the current music (if any), and begins playing the call to pray. Once the call to pray is completed, CasaTunes resumes playing what was previously playing, all without any user intervention.
CasaTunes has seen increased interest for its whole house audio solutions from the Middle East, especially in the United Arab Emirates. Recently, HDL Dubai signed on as the CasaTunes distributor for the Middle East.
“We have been seeing a steady increase in demand coming from the Middle East as a result of our partnership with HDL and HDL Dubai,” says Steve Guerra, VP business development with CasaTunes.
“Many customers in this region were asking if CasaTunes could automate support for Muslim prayers time announcement (Adhan), and to satisfy the needs of our customers, we developed the first multi-room audio solution with integrated Muslim call to pray support.”
Mohamed El Bachtigui, operations manager for HDL Dubai adds: “We are extremely pleased that CasaTunes quickly responded to our markets request to develop the Prayer time and Adhan announcement which allows our customers the flexibility to listen to the Quran or music and to accurately schedule prayer time every day. Having Adhan built into the CasaTunes system gives us a total solution for the Muslim community.”
Specifically, the new feature enables customers to:
- Select which rooms to play the Adhan
- Select which day to enable or disable the Adhan on a weekly schedule basis
- Select a different custom Adhan for each daily prayer
- Provide fine-grain control over when prayers start
Daily prayers times are very important and measured according to the movement of the sun, and therefore change daily. These prayers include near dawn (Fajr), after midday has passed and the sun starts to tilt downwards around noon (Dhuhr), in the afternoon (Asr), just after sunset (Maghrib) and around nightfall (Isha’a). CasaTunes provides several common prayer time calculation methods that take into account exact location (latitude and longitude) and Asr jurisdiction. In addition, custom prayer time calculation method can be created and end-user adjustments can be applied to these calculated values.