Play Controls

The play/pause button begins playing the track that you have loaded into the deck, from the point the yellow play cursor is set. If there is no track loaded into the deck this button will do nothing. After you have started a track playing, clicking the play/pause button pauses the track at that point. If the deck is synced to another deck, it may not start at the expected position. The deck will start playing at the same bar position as the master deck.

There are no fast forward or rewind buttons in Zulu because you can skip to any place you wish in a track in the waveform windows.

Just to the left of the play/pause button is the jump to start button. If the yellow play cursor is somewhere in the middle of the track, you can click this button to quickly jump back to the beginning of the track. If Strict Mode is enabled, then the cursor will jump as close as possible to the start while preserving the tempo.

The left and right arrowed controls allow the user to temporarily slow or speed a deck for the purposes of manually matching the beats between decks, similar to using a jog wheel of a controller. It will slow down/speed up 4% from the current position of the pitch/speed slider. Please note that these buttons only apply a single change that will be removed on release of the button. Use these buttons in conjunction with the synchronous clock to gauge when the decks are matched up. These buttons can still be used to match up the beats while decks are synced.

Use cue buttons to bookmark sections in your tracks so you can quickly skip, cue, match tempo, create loops, and more. See the Cue Point topic in this manual for more information about setting cue points. If Strict mode is enabled or if the deck is synced, playing from a cue point may not start exactly from a cue point as the tempo will be matched. These points will be stored in the library with the track information. These buttons can be reset with a right click.

The Cue Point Lock prevents the Cue Points or beat loops from being deleted if a right click is used accidentally.

Each beat loop button is associated with the Cue Point button above it. The Beat loop length is determined by the Beat Loop Length control at the right of the beat loop buttons. When a Beat Loop button is pressed, it will apply the specified loop length to the position currently set in the above cue point. If the above cue point position is not set then it will default to the cursor position. While the beat loop is applied, its length can be increased or decreased using hotkeys, the Deck context (right click) menu or the main menu. This length is saved in the library for future use. When the track is loaded by a deck, the previously used beat loops will also be loaded. These buttons can be reset with a right click.

This control specifies the length of a beat loop (if the beat loop is not already set) when it is applied. A Left Click shows the list of available lengths.

1/8 One eighth of a beat
1/4 One fourth of a beat
1/2 One half of a beat
1 One single beat
2 Two single beats
3 Three single beats
4 Four single beats
6 Six beats
8 Eight beats
12 Twelve beats
16 Sixteen beats
32 Thirty two beats
Loop Track Loops the entire track loaded by the deck. Please note that this is available through the main menu and the deck context(right click) menu.

The Pitch Lock button controls whether the pitch will be changed when changing the tempo. Click this button if you want to keep the original pitch while altering the speed using the Pitch/Speed slider.

The pitch/speed slider controls the pitch and speed of the track currently playing. You can speed up or slow down the track by moving the slider left or right. Note that unless the Lock Pitch button is pressed, the pitch will also raise or lower. To the right of the pitch slider is displayed a percentage of how much the pitch has changed from its original value.

The pitch/speed slider is normally used to adjust the speed of one track down so that it plays at the same speed as the track playing in the other deck, allowing you to smoothly mix one track into another without ever losing the beat. This is a skill which takes practice, however.

When you use the sync button to synchronize one deck to another you will notice that the pitch slider changes the pitch of the track so that it syncs to the speed of the other deck.

The sync button uses the BPM and beat markers to slow down or speed up a track in one particular deck and "synchronize" it to the track in the other deck. For this to work properly the BPM of both tracks must be set accurately.

A sync menu button is available to allow you to select which target you would like the deck to sync to. Once a target has been selected, the sync button will be updated with the current sync target.

The pitch/speed slider, BPM, beat markers and sync buttons are all designed to help you sync one track to another track. Due to the nature of music however, certain tracks can never be perfectly synchronized. It is up to the skill of the DJ (you) to use these tools as best you can and to study which tracks of music will be able to be synchronized or not.

If Zulu has made an incorrect analysis of the BPM, the sync button will behave unpredictably and you may have to adjust the pitch/speed slider yourself until you feel the two tracks are playing in sync (this is a skill which may take some practice though). You can also set the BPM to a more accurate setting by editing the BPM.

The headphones output button has a small image of a pair of headphones on it. When you click on it, it will send the output of that deck's track to the headphones. For additional decks(C-F). This will remove sound from main speaker and play only to headphones.

In the audio section of the Options window you have the ability to choose a separate audio output for your headphones and speakers if you have an ASIO compatible soundcard which supports multiple outputs. This allows you to play one deck out the main speakers while playing the other deck into your headphones. ASIO will provide the best performance and the lowest possible latency and offer the greatest accuracy when synchronizing recordings. Another option is to install the driver from ASIO4ALL which provides a layer over the regular soundcard, allowing it to be used as an ASIO device by software such as Zulu. You can download it for free from http://www.asio4all.com/.

In a live situation, you would use this ability to listen to the track playing out the main speakers while changing the speed of the track playing in your headphones so it syncs to the track on the main speakers. As the main track begins to end, you would first turn off the headphones output for the new track and then crossfade the old track into the new track.

5 sliders are available to help adjust the decks output. The middle point of the slider represents a zero gain to the associated frequency band of the Deck audio output.

The deck swap button is only available on the Additional Decks. This button allows the currently set track to be swapped with the specified deck (A or B). All track options such as loops, sync, pitch, etc, are also be swapped.