BEATS 1.2.0 Released
July 12, 2010
BEATS is back with v1.2.0, and it’s now a whole lot faster. Performance-wise, it blows away previous releases, especially when working with long songs.
In case you aren’t cool and don’t know what BEATS is, it’s the top command-line drum machine of 2010. Feed it a song notated in YAML, and it will produce a wave file of impeccable timing and feel. To learn more, visit http://beatsdrummachine.com.
How Fast Is It?
Let’s look at some graphs prepared by the BEATS intern. Here’s how long it takes to generate audio[1] for the venerable example_song.txt, comparing BEATS 1.2.0 with the previous two versions:
Using Ruby 1.8, it’s more than 6x faster than 1.1.0, and almost 12x faster than 1.0.0. An even more dramatic improvement is shown when using the -s option (which saves each track to a separate wave file):
That’s right, the -s option is now 13x faster when using Ruby 1.8. (To be fair, the huge performance increase is partially because the -s option got no love in 1.1.0).
As nice as that is, the example song is only 24 seconds long. You’ll see an even bigger improvement when working with longer songs. I’ve created another example, which lasts for 3 minutes, 18 seconds. Let’s look at the results when mixing everything down to a single track. (Note that though these graphs look about the same as the previous ones, the scales are totally different).
BEATS 1.2.0 shaves 19 seconds off the run time when using Ruby 1.8. As for the -s option:
Congratulations, BEATS 1.2.0 on Ruby 1.8 will give you back 99 seconds of your life, which happens to be a 19x improvement.
Some Other Stuff
The focus of this release has been making it faster, along with revamping the internal architecture (which I must say, is now much better). However, a few bugs have been fixed as well:
- When using 8-bit sounds, the audio output sometimes contains pops, clicks, and other weird noises.
- Output audio files are sometimes saved to the wrong folder when using the
-soption. - Non
Xor.characters in a track rhythm are treated as a rest, instead of an error. - Cryptic error messages are shown when:
- A pattern has no tracks
- A track has no rhythm
- A sound file can’t be found
Links
- http://beatsdrummachine.com The 100% authorized website.
- Announcement for BEATS 1.1.0
- Announcement for BEATS 1.0.0
- All tests run on a MacBook Pro, 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo.