Joel Strait

Today it’s time to take the wraps off a project I’ve been working on recently: BEATS, a command-line drum machine written in Ruby.

BEATS runs from the command line. Feed it a YAML text file specifying the song as input, and it produces a Wave file containing a performance of the song as output. Here’s an example song:

Song:
  Tempo: 120
  Structure:
    - Verse:   x2
    - Chorus:  x4
    - Verse:   x2
    - Chorus:  x4

Verse:
  - bass.wav:       X...X...X...X...
  - snare.wav:      ..............X.
  - hh_closed.wav:  X.XXX.XXX.X.X.X.
  - agogo_high.wav: ..............XX

Chorus:
  - bass.wav:       X...X...XX..X...
  - snare.wav:      ....X.......X...
  - hh_closed.wav:  X.XXX.XXX.XX..X.
  - tom4.wav:       ...........X....
  - tom2.wav:       ..............X.

And here is what BEATS produces, using sounds sampled from a vintage Casio keyboard.

Pros and Cons

A few things I like about BEATS:

• You can easily save each track to a separate wave file, using the -s option. This is important if you want to use the drum tracks in a program such as Logic or Garageband and mix each track separately.
• It’s very simple to create new beats, all you need to do is open your text editor. Since your beats are stored in text files, nothing is locked in some weird binary file format.

And what I don’t like so much:

• It ain’t exactly a speed demon yet. Note however that it runs more than twice as fast in Ruby 1.9 compared to Ruby 1.8. Update 7/12/2010: As of v1.2.0, BEATS is now up to 19x faster than the original version.

Great! I Want It!

For more info, including installation and usage instructions, visit the official, 100%-authorized BEATS website: http://beatsdrummachine.com.

Links

• http://beatsdrummachine.com The 100% authorized website.
• Announcement for BEATS 1.2.0
• Announcement for BEATS 1.1.0

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