Old Beast News

= What Was New? (Ancient Beast News) =

Wednesday 12 March 2008
Fantasy III Contest

The Fantasy Project is an annual challenge. Each artist who participates can create his own song, as long as he uses the lyrics given below ("Jean Lucs Poem") unchanged. All styles of music, such as classical, blues, rock, metal, rap, dance, techno, house, ... are welcome.
 * Fantasy III Contest
 * Fantasy II Results

Thursday 28 December 2006
New release with security fix

BEAST/BSE version 0.7.1 is available from the Beast_Download section.


 * BEAST tarball: beast-0.7.1.tar.bz2
 * BEAST patch: beast-0.7.0-0.7.1.diff.bz2
 * ALSA driver: bse-alsa-0.7.1.tar.bz2

The 0.7 development series of Beast focusses on improving usability and ease of music production. Feedback is very much appreciated, please take the opportunity and provide your comments and questions in online forums like the Beast Beast_Help_Desk, Beast Bugzilla or the mailing list.

Many new features went into this release and lot of normal bugfixes and one security bugfix:
 * Fixed SUID security vulnerability by validating success of seteuid/setreuid, related security advisories, describing the vulnerability:
 * CVE-2006-2916 - artswrapper
 * CVE-2006-4447 - X.Org

Translation updates were made to italian. The Release NEWS section has the exact change list, so enjoy the new code and please report all bugs encountered.

Sunday 22 October 2006
Development News

Some time has passed since the last release, so here is an update on the things we've been working on:


 * The test suite is being improved. We have now three different test targets, make check, make slowcheck and make perf, which contain normal tests, tests that take a lot of cpu time and performance tests. One important goal is to make normal tests as fast as possible, so that it is no longer painful to run make check after changing something. Better testing means less bugs in the long run.
 * Normal and SSE optimized fast factor 2 resampling has been improved and added, as proposed in enhancement bug #336366. Right now, this change is not end-user visible, but it's intended to provide at least command-line access to it in beast-0.7.1.
 * Work has started on reimplementing some of the IIR filter code, by integrating code from Stephen L. Moshier. The BseIIRFilter plugin (which allows high-pass, low-pass, band-pass and band-stop filtering) is currently numerically instable, which these improvements should fix, once finished. The new code will allow designing elliptic filters, which provide sharper filter cutoff than anything we had before.
 * Some support for generation of documentation for C++ code with our documentation tool, doxer, has been added. An example for a C++ class with some documentation is the Birnet::Deletable class.
 * The Birnet library, which provides some essential functionality for BEAST and Rapicorn, such as a C++ signal system and C++ threads has been ported to C++. By this change, the remaining legacy C code was be removed.
 * There is a workaround for the problems we had with different versions of intltool in the SVN now. The real fix needs to go in intltool, see #358495.

Some bugs were fixed:
 * #346916: Tact numbers in TrackRoll view wrong
 * #353135: Detuning/Transposing Xtal Strings
 * #353442: DavOrgran transpose / fine_tune
 * #364041: Making the DavOrgan module testable
 * #336366: Fast factor 2 resampling

Wednesday 16 August 2006
 Documentation updates

The documentation section and the historic section got updated, and we've put up a new BEAST overview paper on the website, this time in english:

BEAST - Music Synthesis Under Linux (PDF)

Sunday 16 July 2006
 Release of the new development branch

BEAST/BSE version 0.7.0 is available from the download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.


 * BEAST tarball: beast-0.7.0.tar.bz2
 * BEAST patch: beast-0.6.6-0.7.0.diff.bz2
 * ALSA driver: bse-alsa-0.7.0.tar.bz2

The 0.7 development series of Beast focusses on improving usability and ease of music production. Feedback is very much appreciated, please take the opportunity and provide your comments and questions in online forums like the [[Beast_Help_Desk], Beast Bugzilla or the [[Beast_Contact|mailing list]].

Many new features went into this release and a load of bugfixes. Translation updates were made to canadian english, german, spanish, czech, italian, catalan, dutch and swedish. A nepali translation was newly started. The Release NEWS section has the exact change list, so enjoy the new code and please report all bugs encountered.

Saturday 15 July 2006
Source Repository change

The Gnome project is currently migrating its source code repository, so the BEAST sources are kept in a Beast SVN Repo now.

So far, the migration went smooth, the download section has already been updated accordingly, and we're working on adjusting all remaining references to point to the new source code repository.

Sunday 9 July 2006
 Development News

We're still sorting out issues to make the 0.7.0 release finally happen. Here is what happened since the last development news.
 * New release notes dialog, which will be shown the first time a new release is started (since the release notes are now provided online at our website, the dialog mainly contains links to the relevant sections of the website).
 * Bugfixes, refactoring and cleanups improving both, the actual C/C++/Scheme sources and the build system.
 * Support project portland desktop independant browser activation.
 * Since all songs, instruments and effects have a license and author field, filling out all of them used to be tedious. So now there is now a default license and a default author which which can be configured in Preferences / BSE.
 * German and italian translations were updated.
 * Development of a native JACK driver has been started and some issues concerning the code have been discussed on the mailing list. However, there are still issues with the driver that need to be sorted out, so it will not be part of the 0.7.0 release.

Wednesday 17 May 2006
 Development News

We are right now preparing for the 0.7.0 release. To keep you updated what has been going on in CVS, here are some of the user visible changes.
 * The first thing that is different is that we have a new documentation system, so the online-help is now shipped as HTML. This means that you can view it in the web browser of your choice, and our custom help viewer is gone.
 * We also have been working on a few new example instruments that come with BEAST.
 * Then, we've been optimizing the performance of the scopes, so they need considerably less CPU time than they used to.
 * The introduction of SSE instructions into BEAST means that also other parts will be faster, such as the mixer.
 * People compiling from source or creating packages will be happy to hear that the next BEAST release will compile with gcc 4.x out of the box. We also have upgraded our build system automake-1.9.

And of course, we have been fixing bugs, but there are always some left to keep us busy: Bug List.

Monday 24 April 2006
 LAD Conference 2006

Stefan Westerfeld and Tim Janik are going to the 4th International Linux Audio Conference this Wednesday (26th April) to Sunday (30th April). There is a Beast session in the program, and there will probably also be some Beast demoing and chitchat about Beast in the booth area.

Sunday 19 February 2006
 Website move

The BEAST website has been moved to a new documentation tool which will fix the current build problems with BEAST documentation and can be better tailored to the project needs. Many small things have been fixed all over the site, and we are finally able to produce reference documentation from the central BEAST components: SFI-API, BSE-API, GXK-API and for script development: BSE-API structures and procedures and BSE-Objects.

The site layout and HTML have also been improved during the move, the website should be much more portable across different browsers now. Please feel free to explore the new site and report any problems you encounter (broken links, missing redirects, layout problems, etc).

Thursday 26 May 2005
Important bug fix release

BEAST/BSE version 0.6.6 is available from the Beast_Download, here is the FootNotes announcement.


 * BEAST tarball: beast-0.6.6.tar.gz
 * BEAST patch: patch-beast-0.6.5-0.6.6.bz2
 * ALSA driver: bse-alsa-0.6.6.tar.gz
 * PortAudio driver: bse-portaudio-0.6.6.tar.gz

This release contains important bug fixes. Major bugs in the BSE file saving mechanism got fixed, so updating to 0.6.6 is recommended to prevent data loss. Also, some important GUI fixes were made, such as fixing the logic around dealing with modified projects and all message dialogs got a major overhaul. Translation updates were made to canadian english, czech, italian and spanish, and a basque translations was newly started. The Release NEWS section has the exact change list, so enjoy the new code as always and please report bugs to our mailing list.

Wednesday 13 April 2005
A new release - we finaly made it!

BEAST/BSE version 0.6.5 is available from the Beast_Download, here is the FootNotes announcement.


 * BEAST tarball: beast-0.6.5.tar.gz
 * BEAST patch: patch-beast-0.6.4-0.6.5.bz2
 * ALSA driver: bse-alsa-0.6.4.tar.gz
 * PortAudio driver: bse-portaudio-0.6.4.tar.gz

This release introduces support for GUS Patch files, has a new tool "bsewavetool" to create BseWave files - a multi-sample file format that can be read by BEAST - it has a new saturator effect and a new script to automatically assign mixer busses to tracks. Apart from that, there also were lots of minor improvements and bug fixes, and the usual set of language updates. Translation updates in particular were made to british english, canadian english, czech, dutch and spanish. Newly started translations are bulgarian and kinyarwanda. The Release NEWS section has the exact change list, so enjoy the new code and please report bugs to our mailing list.

Friday 4 February 2005
From the "I'll be back" dept.

Our Wiki is back! Gtk.org is running new PHP packages now, so the wiki and search facility could be re-enabled. In other news, we're working on the next release, so expect 0.6.5 soon.

Sunday 26 Dec 2004
From the "security first" dept.

Due to a recent security advisory, PHP support has been taken down on gtk.org. So currently the search facility and the beast wiki are not available. We apologize for the inconvenience and will put stuff back to work once debian packages the new PHP versions that plug all known security holes.

Saturday 18 Dec 2004
The "Clean up your mind" Release

BEAST/BSE version 0.6.4 is available from the Beast_Download section.


 * BEAST tarball: beast-0.6.4.tar.gz
 * BEAST patch: patch-beast-0.6.3-0.6.4.bz2
 * ALSA driver: bse-alsa-0.6.4.tar.gz
 * PortAudio driver: bse-portaudio-0.6.4.tar.gz

The most important change in this release is probably the reduced CPU consumption due to lowered scope updating priority. Very convenient are the newly added -n and -N (don't renice) options which may be used to adjust or bypass the scheduling priority raising effects of the suid launcher executables. A nice bonus in this release are the [[Beast_Screenshots_stwZ04-fft_scopes.png|FFT based spectrographs], available for all synthesis modules with output channels via the context menu. New with this release is the experimental PortAudio driver, Stefan Westerfeld put a lot of work into making this happen, so please give the driver a try and supply us with [mailto:beast@gnome.org positive and negative feedback]. And as usual, we've had quite a number of language translation updates, in particular canadian english, british english, czech, dutch and spanish. Behind the scenes, we've also been doing some code cleanups, removed libbsw from the build process and applied GCC-3.4 compilation fixes. As always, the [[Beast_NEWS|Release NEWS section]] has the exact changes, enjoy the new code and please report bugs to our mailing list.

Thursday 18 Nov 2004
'''The "Legends may sleep, but they never die!" Release'''

BEAST/BSE version 0.6.3 and BSE-ALSA version 0.6.3 are available from the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.


 * BEAST tarball: beast-0.6.3.tar.gz
 * BEAST patch: patch-beast-0.6.2-0.6.3.bz2
 * ALSA driver: bse-alsa-0.6.3.tar.gz

It took a long time to get this release out, but the new features and the bug fixes are definitely worth it! As usual, we've had lots of language updates, many GUI fixes, but also some critical stability fixes. Major new features are: a stereo mixer for songs, DB meters, MIDI automation and a new sample-and-hold module by Artem Popov. As always, the Release NEWS section has the exact changes, enjoy the new code and please report bugs to our mailing list.

Wednesday 07 Jul 2004
The "small but steady steps" Release

BEAST/BSE version 0.6.2 is available from the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

Tarball: beast-0.6.2.tar.gz and patch: patch-beast-0.6.1-0.6.2.bz2.

Lots of tiny but important details got fixed in this release. BEAST also had a lot of language translation updates, and supports more fine grained note quantization and note lengths. Behind the scenes, there's also been some more infrastructure work, the results of which aren't going to surface before another releases or two though. As always, the Release NEWS section has the exact changes, enjoy the new code and please report bugs to our mailing list.

Sunday 04 Jul 2004
 Mailing List Back Up

Thanks to Owen Taylor, a configuration error of the beast mailing list was fixed, so the list is up again and reports about the new release candidate (as well as ordinary beast stuff) can be discussed on list again.

Thursday 01 Jul 2004
New Release Candidate

A new release candidate beast-0.6.2-rc2.tar.gz is up in the download area. The mailing list is currently non-functional so please send problems and success stories about the candidate to [mailto:timj@gtk.org Tim Janik].

Sunday 07 Mar 2004
The low latency BEAST Release

BEAST/BSE version 0.6.1 is available from the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

Tarball: beast-0.6.1.tar.gz and patch: patch-beast-0.6.0-0.6.1.bz2.

Apart from important bug fixes, this release comes with a small suid wrapper, that acquires a nice level of -20 and drops privileges. This allows beast to let the synthesis threads run with increased scheduling priorities which greatly reduces the possibility for drop-outs. Under one of the recent 2.6 Linux kernels, this also allows very low latency setups with delays around only 2 milli seconds. Also among the newly added features is a highly experimental prototype of a pattern editor. While this widget isn't fully functional yet, it already offers some interesting editing functions. Other features, updated languages and more bug fixes are listed in the Release NEWS section.

Wednesday 18 Feb 2004
Website updates

BEAST v0.6.0 supports skins for the piano roll and event roll widgets, so we've opened up a [http:sound-browser.phtml?loc=/skins place to collect skin packages]. The Wiki also had changes on the Beast_Features and Beast_Feature_Requests pages and the synthesis links section was updated.

Wednesday 11 Feb 2004
BEAST Release "Silver Vein"

BEAST/BSE version 0.6.0 is available from the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

Tarball: beast-0.6.0.tar.gz and patch: patch-beast-0.5.6-0.6.0.bz2.

Besides loads of bug fixes in this release, newly added features involve per-track scopes, skins for the event and piano roll widgets, major speedups, an AIFF file loader and four new language translations. As always, the Release NEWS section has all the glory details.

Thursday 22 Jan 2004
Wiki openings

The BEAST website has a Wiki area now, all users and visitors are invited to discuss various topics or to sign the GuestBook.

Saturday 10 Jan 2004
BSE Sound Archive

We just opened up the BSE Sound Archive. Here, users can contribute and exchange BSE songs, samples or instrument and effect files. For demonstration purposes, we will also take Ogg/Vorbis files alongside a BSE Song to ease previews. For instance, here is the Ogg/Vorbis version of the BEAST demo song Party Monster.

Have fun and start contributing! ;-)

Monday 29 Dec 2003
intltool add-on for beast-0.5.6

Aparently intltool 0.28 which the last beast release uses, requires a specific perl module to be available in order to build. So for some users, the build has been failing. If you run into build errors (with LC_ALL) like:

$ make -C data make: Entering directory `/tmp/beast-0.5.6/data' LC_ALL=C ../intltool-merge ../po beast.desktop.in beast.desktop -d -u -c ../po/.intltool-merge-cache The OrigTree module doesn't seem to be properly installed ../intltool-merge make: *** [beast.desktop] Error 2 make: Leaving directory `/tmp/beast-0.5.6/data'

you can apply this patch patch-beast-0.5.6-0.5.6+intltool.bz2 like:

$ patch -p1 < patch-beast-0.5.6-0.5.6+intltool patching file intltool-modules/XML/Parser/Style/OrigTree.pm

in order to supply the perl module and get intltool to work.

Sunday 28 Dec 2003
BEAST Realease "Popcorn"

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.6 is available from the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

Tarball: beast-0.5.6.tar.gz and patch: patch-beast-0.5.5-0.5.6.bz2.

Newly added features in this release involve a TB-303 style Bass Filter, major GUI improvements, MIDI file import abilities, a new C++ language binding, new language translations and finally an About box. As always, the Release NEWS section has all the glory details.

In other news, we're looking for a graphics artist to improve plugin icons and help us develop fancier widgets like sliders, knobs, etc... Please [mailto:beast@gnome.org drop us a line] at our mailing list if you're willing to contribute.

And finally, the screen shot area has had some updates, to reflect newer BEAST versions.

Monday 27 Oct 2003
BEAST Realease & LinuxUser Article

The german LinuxUser Magazin features a BEAST Workshop in it's newest edition. We kindly thank the LinuxUser people for putting this article online.

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.5 is available from the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

Tarball: beast-0.5.5.tar.gz and patch: patch-beast-0.5.4-0.5.5.bz2.

Newly added features in this release involve Canyon Delay, MIDI Input, Panorama and Compressor modules, a demo song, stock instruments and effects, extended integration with external MIDI events, a new C++ based plugin interface, MIME type support and lots of language translations. The details are outlined in the Release NEWS section.

August 27 Jul 2003
Site closed due to software patents

The BEAST website joins the online demonstration of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure against software patents and closes its front page on August the 27th.

Tuesday 22 Jul 2003
BEAST Realease [Velocity Edit]

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.4 is available in the Beast_Download section.

Tarball: beast-0.5.4.tar.gz and patch: patch-beast-0.5.3-0.5.4.bz2.

Newly added features in this release involve a drum module, velocity-, fine-tune- and control-event-editing in songs and support for post-processing effects in songs. The details are outlined in the Release NEWS section.

Friday 18 Jul 2003
BEAST RPM Packages

After visiting the BEAST talk at LinuxTag 2003, [mailto:gwaluga@computerbraxas.de Gregor Waluga] wrote a small under-SuSE 82.txt HOWTO (english and german) about getting BEAST to run under SuSE 8.2. Assorted RPMs build by him are available from the Beast_Download section.

Thursday 10 Jul 2003
BEAST IRC Channel & LinuxTag 2003

Stefan Westerfeld and Tim Janik are going to the LinuxTag 2003 this Weekend (11.-13. July). We'll probably hang out at the GNOME and KDE booths if people want to catch us to talk about BEAST, aRts or CSL.

A german paper accompanying the BEAST talk held at LinuxTag has been added to our Documentation section.

If we're not hanging out at LinuxTag, you may also join us for a chat on the #beast channel on the GimpNet IRC Network. The Contact section has more details if you're not familiar with IRC yet.

Wednesday 25 Jun 2003
BEAST Bugfix Realease

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.3 is available in the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

Tarball: beast-0.5.3.tar.gz and patch: patch-beast-0.5.2-0.5.3.bz2.

Aparently version 0.5.2 crashed during script initialization on some systems due to bugs in the child communication code. So here is a quick update, fixing the crash and other minor bugs.

Saturday 21 Jun 2003
The i-didn't-mean-to Realease

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.2 is available in the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

Tarball: beast-0.5.2.tar.gz and patch: patch-beast-0.5.1-0.5.2.bz2.

With this release, BEAST allowes to gracefully backup from erroneous user actions, by offering unlimited Undo/Redo facilities for all operations. Other highlights are greatly simplified sample and synthesizer selection for tracks and WAV recording abilities. As usual, more release details are outlined in the Release NEWS section.

Sunday 20 Apr 2003
BEAST-0.5.1 patch fixed

The BEAST patch to update from version 0.5.0 to 0.5.1 unfortunately missed an image file (due to it being detected as binary by diff), causing the 0.5.1 build to fail for some users. We've put up a new patch as patch-beast-0.5.0-0.5.1.fixed.gz now, which contains the missing file and correctly updates from 0.5.0 to beast-0.5.1.tar.gz. We apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused.

On a related topic, many users encountered crashes upon creation of synthesis networks with the newer versions, there is now a FAQ entry adressing the specifics of the issue.

Monday 14 Apr 2003
BEAST Featuring LADSPA

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.1 is available in the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

The most exciting new feature in this release is the support for LADSPA plugins. With that, BEAST gains support for a wide variety of excellent plugins available on the net, for instance the plugin collection from Steve Harris.

As usual, more release details are outlined in the Release NEWS section.

Wednesday 19 Mar 2003
List move and site updates

The BEAST mailing list has moved. People may subscribe to the new list at http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/beast/ now, or just read the archives at http://mail.gnome.org/archives/beast/. Also, the link section has been updated, and we got new or updated screen shots (amongst them the new track editor) in the screen shot area.

Thursday 13 Mar 2003
New Development Release

BEAST/BSE version 0.5.0 is available in the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

This new development series of BEAST comes with a lot of the internals redone, many new GUI features and a sound generation back-end separated from any GUI activities. The most outstanding new feature is the track editor which allows free arrangement of parts in songs and adds loop support to simplify song edits.

More details can be found in the Release NEWS section.

Thursday 27 February 2003
LinuxForum 2003

Stefan Westerfeld and Tim Janik are going to the Linux Forum 2003 this Saturday (1st March). We'll probably hang out at the debian booth if people want to catch us to talk about BEAST, aRts or CSL.

UPDATE: Stefan Westerfeld posted a summary of our discussions with Leon Shiman, who leads the Media Application Server development group, to the kde-multimedia list.

Friday 21 February 2003
Recent Development

Lots of website content has been improved recently. The Historic section got updated, and thanks to Alper Ersoys continued work on the documentation system, the constantly evolving Reference and Development docs now support function, structure and external API links.

In actual program development, Stefan Westerfeld has hacked up a new BEAST backend, supporting PCM output through CSL, so BEAST can now benefit from CSLs sound server support. Also, there's a new track editor widget developing in CVS, enabling more complex arrangements of songs. We'll post screenshots of the new widget as soon as its GUI has matured a bit. For the curious, NEWS has more details about development highlights in the upcoming 0.4.2 release.

Saturday 11 January 2003
Website Switch

The new website is up, finally! Many thanks go to [mailto:dirt@gtk.org Alper Ersoy] for his continued efford to set the site up. The new site has a completely redone layout, improved structure and a lot more content.

So browse and enjoy! ;-)

Tuesday 31 Dec 2002
Ongoing Work

The CVS tree has undergone major shuffeling recently due to integration of a new middleware layer into BSE. In other news, our website maintainer [mailto:dirt@gtk.org Alper Ersoy] is working hard on a new website layout which is why we haven't had much site updating in the last couple weeks.

We expect to switch web presence over anytime soon, so stay tuned for a new look and much improved content.

Monday 2 Sep 2002
New Development Release

BEAST/BSE version 0.4.1 is available in the Beast_Download section, here is the FootNotes announcement.

Much has changed in the new development version of BEAST. In brief (specifics can be found in the NEWS section), the GUI was majorly polished, many new synthesis features have been added and support for various external wave file formats was implemented.

The current version is already good enough to perform interesting synthesis tasks and to have lots of fun with songs, external MIDI devices and samples. However, this is still an ALPHA version, so things might not always work as expected, reports about misbehaviour are welcome. Be warned though, the .bse file format hasn't fully stabelized yet, so incompatibilities whith future versions may occour.

A good starting point are the test files shipped in the tests/ subdirectory of the source package or the new Quick Start Guide in the Help menu.

Friday 23 Aug 2002
Logo Contest Winner

And the winner is... jimmac!

jimmac's entry is decided to be the official logo for Beast/BSE. The upcoming release will feature the winner image as a splash screen, and the logo will appear here once the website is facelifted. The current release candidates are actually featuring the winner image.

We want to specially thank everyone who sent an entry. You may visit the contest entries at the logo submissions page.

Saturday 27 Jul 2002
Hold your breath

Tim has put lots of work into our new toy, Piano Roll Editor, and it shows. Also, Beast is able to playback songs once again. Enjoy, all.

Saturday 1 Jun 2002
Going on with the new features

BSE now has a Guile based scheme shell called bswshell. In parallel, BEAST supports the execution of Scheme scripts. On the other news, there is a new filter called Biquad Filter.

Monday 13 May 2002
Recovering from an ill-willed harddisk

We've been having a disk outage at gtk.org, which unfortunately took some recent work on the BEAST website with it. Nevertheless, BEAST development continues in various areas, and we're focussing on a new development release, shortly after official stable libgnomecanvas tarballs are out (i.e. around the release of GNOME 2.0). Amongst the highlights that were recently completed in the CVS version are, new synthesis modules: FreeVerb, BiquadFilter, ADSR Envelope, IIR Filter, IOPorts/SubSynth, Constant, WaveOsc and a simple Sequencer. The majority of the original plugins got ported to the new engine which meanwhile gained joint (multi-connect) channel support (that is, multiple signals may be routed to a single input channel which then automatically sums them up). Also the new 19"-rack alike GUI front-end is already usable to some extend and a lot of overall GUI polishing has also been done.

Sunday 3 March 2002
General Site Overhaul

We worked on the site to improve its structure so it will be easier for us to add new content or update the existing easier. Also, we now have some neat new content, namely the API docs and the screenshots page. FAQ is updated too. Last but not least, logo submissions page is more browsable, thanks to the thumbnails.

On the CVS side, the rack editor is slowly becoming usable, .ogg and .wav files are supported, new synthesis modules (IIR filter, Resonance filter) available, and right now Tim is working on an MP3 loader.

Monday 14 January 2002
Recent Going-Ons

There were many major changes in the core of BEAST/BSE in the CVS recently. The core engine has been replaced with a new one which is shared between BEAST and the aRts of KDE. Most plugins have been ported to this new engine. Unfortunately this change also made the song format which is supported in the 0.3.3 release not being adequately supported right now.

Along with that, we now have MIDI support, too.

Other works-in-progress are: rather limited support of the 0.3.3 release, which is around .bse sample files, is being replaced with a more sophisticated sample support. At first BEAST will read wav, ogg and raw formats, and these will become usable in Synth networks. Also loaded samples can be edited. Syth networks will finally be used as instruments in the songs.

Also, Tim is working on an easy to use GUI extension, visually modeled after real-world 19" racks.

Besides beast.gtk.org has a new webmaster, so hopefully it will get more frequent updates in the future.

Monday 2 July 2001
The-fix-the-loop-Release

BEAST was packaged up and got included into Debian some while ago, which drove the issue home: a bug in newer libart versions resulted in BEAST hanging when synthesis networks are used. So despite plans to concentrate all effords on the Gtk+-1.3.x based development version, a 0.3.2 based workaround release 0.3.3 is now out. This is expected to be the last Gtk+-1.2.x based release being made.

In other news, the development version is shaping quite well, it gained MIDI and threading support based on a new synthesis core. However it's got a lot of rough edges still and needs a bunch work before being publically consumable.

Once again, beast.gtk.org is looking for a new webmaster, so if you have skills in this area and love contributing, send off an [mailto:timj@gtk.org email].

Monday 30 October 2000
BEASTIE BITS

We've recently had a few more logo submissions, so logo submissions page is still worth checking out ;)

BEAST/BSE development has been quite laging recently, mostly because it's type system got moved into GLib's development branch to find widened public consumption with the release of GLib 2.0. BEAST itself is currently being ported to the development version of Gtk+, a new release is scheduled shortly after the release of Gtk+ 2.0.

On the artistic side, we're still looking for icon submissions for plugins that still use placeholders, and some of the older ones could stand polishing. If you're interested in helping out in this area, please send [mailto:timj@gtk.org us] email.

Monday 9 May 2000
Logo Contest in Progress

As announced on Sunday 12 March, we are in search of a decent logo. Submissions are accepted to ftp://beast.gtk.org/incoming/ and are shown on Beast_Logo_Gallery. If you have questions/comments/feedback, [mailto:timj@gtk.org contact us].

Sunday 12 March 2000
Version 0.3.2 released

See the Gnotice here (mirrored from http://news.gnome.org:80/gnome-news/953148210/).

Plenty of work has been put into this new version, so BEAST is coming closer to ALPHA stage ;) the highlights of this release include new synthesizer modules submitted by David A. Bartold and major GUI improvements.

Though we are happy to have received a few icons so far, BEAST's GUI is still in desperate need for several more. If the placeholder icons [?] annoy you enough, sit down, or get one of your friends to sit down, and create some decent icons. Submissions are greatly appreciated.

Sunday 12 March 2000
We need an ICON!

For the more adventurous ones, BEAST also lacks a decent logo. So if anyone feels like drawing up a cool BEAST with BSE (having some musical tendencies), it could earn you an email alias at gtk.org, magnificent fame and of course immense personal satisfaction ;) (plus a couple of beers if you come around to GUADEC ;)

[mailto:timj@gtk.org Contact us] if you're interested.

Thursday 9 March 2000
We're currently seeking artists to help us with icons and logos. Here are a couple of new screen shots (from the current development version in CVS) to show what things currently look like:


 * [http:images/oldshots/beast-shot-icons1.png This one] shows the icons used in synthesis networks and some other things.
 * The [http:images/oldshots/beast-shot-dnd1.png other one] shows drag and drop of patterns into arrangements.

If you'd like to help, please [mailto:timj@gtk.org email us].

Friday 14 January 2000
Version 0.3.1 released. See the NEWS page for details. As usual, the ChangeLogs are always available for your perusal (see the links in the left column).

Friday 31 December 1999
Version 0.3.0 (pre-alpha) released. For details, see the announcement (mirrored from http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/946616649/index_html) on Gnotices.