Beast is a

music composition Musical composition can refer to an original piece or work of music, either vocal or instrumental, the structure of a musical piece or to the process of creating or writing a new piece of music. People who create new compositions are called c ...

and modular synthesis application released as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

under the

GNU GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

and

GNU LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

licenses, that runs under

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

. It supports

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and re ...

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...

AIFF Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

/ OggVorbis/etc audio files and

LADSPA LADSPA is an acronym for Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API. It is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. It was originally de ...

modules. It is capable of multitrack editing, unlimited undo/redo support, real-time synthesis support, 32-bit audio rendering,

full duplex A duplex communication system is a point-to-point system composed of two or more connected parties or devices that can communicate with one another in both directions. Duplex systems are employed in many communications networks, either to allow ...

support, multiprocessor support, conditional MMX/SSE utilisation for plugins, precise timing down to sample granularity, on-demand and partial loading of

wave file Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wi ...

s, on the fly decoding, stereo mixing,

FFT A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of a sequence, or its inverse (IDFT). Fourier analysis converts a signal from its original domain (often time or space) to a representation in the ...

scopes,

automation Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...

and full

scriptability A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripting ...

Scheme A scheme is a systematic plan for the implementation of a certain idea. Scheme or schemer may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''The Scheme'' (TV series), a BBC Scotland documentary series * The Scheme (band), an English pop band * ''The Schem ...

. The plugins, synthesis core and the user interface are actively being developed and translated into a variety of languages, regularly assimilating user feedback such as from the Beast_Feature_Requests page. BEAST is an abbreviation for Better Audio System. BSE is an abbreviation for Better Sound Engine, and it implements all the necessary music processing logic required by BEAST in a separate reusable

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

. The "Better" portion of the names refer to the complexity and many iterations involved in implementing such a "BEAST".

History

As of 2013, the Beast code base has been migrated to

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

and is mostly written in C++, notable release include: * 31 December 1999: Version 0.3.0 (pre-alpha) released. * 2 July 2001: BEAST was packaged up and got included into

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

. * 2 September 2002: Version 0.4.1 (added support for the extension language

GNU Guile GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions (GNU Guile) is the preferred extension language system for the GNU Project and features an implementation of the programming language Scheme. Its first version was released in 1993. In addition ...

). * 14 April 2003: Version 0.5.1 (BEAST Featuring

) * 7 March 2004: Version 0.6.1 (The low latency BEAST Release) * 13 April 2005: Version 0.6.5 (new tool "bsewavetool") * 25 May 2005: Version 0.6.6 (maintenance) * 16 July 2006: Version 0.7.0 (new synthesis modules) * 28 December 2006: Version 0.7.1 (tunings, CVE fix) * 10 September 2010: Version 0.7.2 (new instruments, LGPL licensing) * 9 April 2011: Version 0.7.4 (driver fixes, performance) * 24 October 2012: Version 0.7.6 (regressions fixes, documentation) * 19 January 2013: Version 0.7.8 (C++ migration, usability) * 15 March 2013: Version 0.8.0 (C++11, use of Rapicorn) * 28 October 2014: Version 0.9.0 * 7 April 2016: Version 0.10.0

References

External links

* Free audio software Audio editing software that uses GTK Free software programmed in C++ Software that was rewritten in C++ {{music-software-stub