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 ...

and modular synthesis application released as

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

under the

GNU GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

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, multi-user 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, a ...

. It supports

MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface (; MIDI) is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, ...

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...

AIFF AIFF may refer to: * Audio Interchange File Format * All India Football Federation, the national governing body of Association football in India Film festivals * Addis International Film Festival, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia * Alexandria Internation ...

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 under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

/ OggVorbis/etc audio files and

LADSPA The Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA) is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. Originally designed through consensus ...

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 or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...

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). A Fourier transform converts a signal from its original domain (often time or space) to a representation in ...

scopes,

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

and full scriptability in

Scheme Scheme or schemer may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''The Scheme'', a BBC Scotland documentary TV series * The Scheme (band), an English pop band * ''The Scheme'', an action role-playing video game for the PC-8801, made by Quest Corporation * ...

. 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 Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

. 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 () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

. * 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 additio ...

). * 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++ Software using the GNU Lesser General Public License {{music-software-stub