Beats is a command-line drum machine written in pure Ruby. Feed it a song notated in YAML, and it will produce a precision-milled *.wav file of impeccable timing and feel. Here's an example song:

Song: Tempo: 105 Flow: - Verse: x4 - Chorus: x4 Kit: - bass: house_2_1.wav - snare: roland_tr_909_2.wav - hihat: house_2_5.wav - cowbell: big_beat_5.wav - deep: house_2_2.wav Verse: - bass: X..X...X..X..... - snare: ....X.......X... - hihat: ..X...X...X...X. Chorus: - bass: X..X...X..X..... - snare: ....X.......X... - hihat: XXXXXXXXXXXXX... - cowbell: ....XX.X..X.X... - deep: .............X.. 

And here's what it sounds like after getting the Beats treatment. What a glorious groove!

For more, check out beatsdrummachine.com

To install the latest stable version (2.1.2) from rubygems.org, run the following from the command line:

gem install beats 

Note: if you're installing using the default version of Ruby that comes with macOS, you might get a file permission error. If that happens, use sudo gem install beats instead. If you're using a version manager such as rbenv, chruby, or RVM, plain gem install beats should work fine.

Once installed, you can then run Beats from the command-line using the beats command.

Beats is not very useful unless you have some sounds to use with it. You can download some example sounds from https://beatsdrummachine.com.

Beats runs from the command-line. Run beats -h to see the available options. For more detailed instructions, visit https://beatsdrummachine.com/usage/.

Check out this tutorial at beatsdrummachine.com to see an example of how to create a beat from scratch.

The latest version of Beats is 2.1.2, released on December 18, 2019. It contains these changes:

• Several confusing/unhelpful errors shown due to an error in an input file have been improved. For example, if a pattern has the invalid name "4", the error message will now be Pattern name '4' is not valid. It must be a value that will be parsed from YAML as a String., instead of undefined method 'downcase' for 4:Integer.

For info about previous releases, visit https://github.com/jstrait/beats/releases.

First, install the required dependencies:

bundle install 

To run Beats locally, use bundle exec and run bin/beats, to avoid using any installed gem executable. For example:

bundle exec bin/beats -v 

To run the tests:

bundle exec rake test 

Contact me (Joel Strait) by opening a GitHub issue.

Beats Drum Machine is released under the MIT license.