Beast is a digital synthesizer and music creation system. It has support for Linux Audio Plugins (LADSPA), multi-track editing, unlimited undo, real-time synthesis, MIDI and various free audio codecs. Bse is the Beast Sound Engine, a library providing the synthesis and audio functions used by Beast.

• For a full description, visit the project page: http://beast.testbit.eu

• To submit bug reports and feature requests, visit: https://github.com/tim-janik/beast/issues

Beast is a soft realtime application which needs elevated CPU scheduling priorities to avoid audio glitches and drop outs. For this purpose, it installs a small uid wrapper which acquires nice level -20 for the synthesis threads and then immediately drops privileges. For Linux kernels of the 2.6.x series and later, this enables the low-latency scheduling behavior needed to avoid audio artefacts.

In order to build release tarballs, GnomeCanvas, Ogg/Vorbis, libflac and npm and libfluidsynth are required. Support for MP3 files is optional and requires libmad (MPEG audio decoder library) when compiling Beast. Compilation requires at least g++-8.3.0 or clang++-9 and a recent Linux distribution like Ubuntu-18.04.

Beast needs GNU Make to build under Linux:

make			# build all components
make check		# run unit and audio tests
make install		# install under $(prefix)
make installcheck	# run installation tests

The build can be configured with:

make default prefix=... CXX=... CC=... CXXFLAGS=...
make help		# brief description about build targets

Note that some Beast versions provide a realtime scheduling wrapper in the launchers/ directory which has to be installed with permissions of the root user to work properly. Realtime scheduling priority helps to avoid drop outs during audio playback.

New source code pushed to the Beast repository is automatically built and tested via Travis-CI. Ever so often we create release candidate packages and later release packages after a stabilization phase. Some of the release candidates and the stable versions are provided as binary packages. Refer to the website for download links:

https://beast.testbit.org/#downloads