Beat Maker is my “pet project” with Allyson Soares at INdT.
It is, basically, a drum loop emulator to be used by musicians during practicing sessions.
You just need to select the samples, define a BPM value and listen to the rhythm ;)
If you can’t wait for the official release at Ovi Store, you can try the beta version for n900 devices.
Remember: it’s a beta version of an open source software. The code can be found linked to my gitorious account.
The technical point of view:
I’m a little bit disappointed with phonon. After a long discussion I’ve realized that phonon could not be used on Beat Maker.
At this time I’m using an approach suggested by Adriano Rezende: play the sound using pulseaudio’s API. I know, it’s not portable. But hey, my target is N900 devices and it worked pretty well at the time.
However, it doesn’t scale. So, now, I’m working on a kind of “in-app-mixer”, which should solve this problem.
There is another problem, related to QTimer. Qt can’t guarantee the timing between the beats using QTimer events. Especially when you generate mouse events. Anyway, the mixer controller loop should solve this as well.
Big thanks to Adriano for the tips, and Allyson who made the excellent UI design.
I hope you enjoy it.
Suggestions are welcome =)
ps.: youtube video bellow
25 Comments
great app . congrats. so are you looking for a replacement to pulseaudio ? I’m also interested in something similar .
Very nice Danilo! Looks darn nice!
Shouldn’t the name of the app (in the title bar) be “Beat Maker” and not “beatmaker”?
@Kenneth: Yes.. I’m patching it now.. Thanks ;)
@2beers: Well, what I’m trying to do is mixing thing on application side, and send just one stream to pulseaudio. But it’s still a working in progress. I will let you know when I finish it.
Thanks for the current version of Beat Maker, it is really a great application, and I just have posted it in the blog MeeGo.de:
Please note that this post is readable for you officially only on Oct 19, 2010.
http://meego.de/apps/sonstige-apps/1116-beat-maker-schlagzeug-emulator.html
Great app! thank you so much :)
@tumleh: Ow, cool! I’m excited to see it there =)
@zifis: Thanks! =)
Awesome, Danilo, just awesome. I’ll be downloading this immediately. I’ll be getting in touch with you; if you’d like any help testing or bug fixing (hell, I’d even help with documentation!), I’d be happy to lend a hand.
Also, let Allyson know I love the interface. I’ll still trying to get the hang of mobile UI design (I’m used to designing for the desktop), and this is quite possibly one of the simplest and most elegant designs I’ve seen.
Surely the BPM is wrong? It was set to 266 bpm at the end of the video, but in reality it sounded more like 130-140 bpm. Can this be scaled to real bpm, or is it limited by the phone?
@Adam,
You’re right. The BPM is wrong… Will be fixed soon. Thanks for the warning ;)
Thanks for the quick reply! I’ll be playing with this app as soon as I leave the office ;)
Very nice application! Just downloading now :)
Congratulations to you and the others.
That’s is what happening when a company allow its employees to work on them personal projects in working time. Great job!
That’s awesome dude, really!
Congrats… Do you have any idea to improve it?
One idea is, being able to make a more precise pattern beat with “Additive rhythm” so we can make some jazzy groovy beat :D!
Congrats again dude, very good idea!
Nice One! I am a jazz drummer… I will try..
Fuck yeah, Danilo! I use Audacity to generate stupid click tracks before I go running (yes.) but your beat track thing sounds more fun, really neat application :-)
Awesome. This is way better than a metronome for my piano practice :)
Nice job :)
Look forward to seeing it improve. I’m currently building a multitrack recorder fro the n900 so it will be great to have a working sample looper on the platform.
I’m guessing it wouldn’t take much to extend your code to let users import their own samples and create different kits?
Would also like to see a longer timeline, the ability to ‘record’ the playback to file (.wav).
But hey, no rush! I know how development works.
I see the code to date is GPL3 are you intending to maintain it under this license even after it makes it to the Ovi store?
Sorry, shoudl have been LGPL 2.1 (not GPL3) looking at too much source code today.
The idea is to keep the code under GPL license. Even if it goes to ovi.
“I’m guessing it wouldn’t take much to extend your code to let users import their own samples and create different kits?” is a future feature =)
For now, I need to fix the mixer… It’s a major/blocker issue before releasing it on Ovi.
I’m refactoring the code too… It was suppose to be a toy, but after 632 downloads we changed our idea =)
I’ll check this out. My usage is to learn patterns to play on my doumbek (derbouka/tabla), so, yes, the ability to import such sounds would be great!
thank you for this brilliant app. If you could change the beet number from 8 : ie to 12 , it would please flamenco musicians greatly.
very good information, ill be sure to bookmark this. Thank you!
This is great for record producers. I will tell others about the quality of your beat maker online tips.
Thanks,
Julie
hey Danilo
awesome app it is so cool problem is I don’t have a phone and I was just wondering if you could write a version that would run on Microsoft windows coz that would be so cool to play around with and use in drum lessons etc.
Thanks Corey
I believe I can’t, sorry. Since it depends on pulseaudio libraries I don’t think you can run it on windows =(
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