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

First: KDE 4.2 was released. I’m using as my “oficial desktop manager” at work and I’m pretty happy about it.

Second: Debian Lenny might be released this month.  I’m using it too, and I know the result will be very good!

Third: BossaConference agenda is ready. Think about great minds talking about OpenSource, Maemo, etc, in a paradisaical beach. I had the opportunity to join Bossa ’07, and it was great! We can’t miss this one! See you there! =)