Where Can I Get BEAST/BSE?

Publically consumable releases can be found via ftp: ftp://beast.gtk.org/pub/beast/.

Or alternatively via http: http://beast.gtk.org/beast-ftp/.

The packages provided in the download directory have the following purposes:

  • beast-VERSION.tar.gz - the main BEAST tarball, this needs to be installed first.
  • bse-alsa-VERSION.tar.gz - an add-on package for BEAST which allowes it to use the ALSA sound driver if installed.
  • bse-portaudio-VERSION.tar.gz - an experimental add-on package to make use of recent development versions of the PortAudio sound driver.

Requirements

To get a basic start, you'll also need Gtk+ >= 2.6, a recent version of the Gtk+-2.6 based GnomeCanvas, Guile-1.6 and the Ogg/Vorbis Codec libraries. Though optional, it is a good idea to also have libmad (MPEG audio decoder library) around when compiling BEAST. Most distributions already ship these packages, their sources can be found at:



BEAST also supports the LADSPA plugin API, so various kinds of third party plugins can be loaded and executed. A collection of links to LADSPA plugins is kept at http://www.ladspa.org/. BEAST will look for LADSPA plugins under lib/ladspa/ of it's own installation prefix, and in the directories listed in $LADSPA_PATH.

Packages

Stock Debian stable, testing and unstable already ship recent beast and bse-alsa packages, so to install beast, a simple:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install beast bse-alsa

should do.

For SuSE, Gregor Waluga has written a small HOWTO in english and german about installing BEAST and created the related RPMs.

Ben Collver is working on a NetBSD package of BEAST, it's current development stage can be tracked at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/pkgsrc-wip/wip/beast/.

A FreeBSD packages there's also a FreeBSD beast package.

Beast has also been packaged for Arch Linux, here is the Arch Linux Beast Query.

For Gentoo there exists a Beast Gentoo Portage Package.

Bleeding Edge

The BEAST/BSE source code tree is hosted on the GNOME project's SVN server in the beast SVN module. You can check it out like this:

$ svn co svn://svn.gnome.org/svn/beast/trunk beast

We recommend that you read the tutorial on using, getting, and building GNOME projects from SVN.

Building from SVN requires additional tools than building the release tarballs. This is due to documentation build rules and code generation rules for which the results are simply included in release tarballs. And unlike release tarballs, the SVN version of BEAST has to be build in place with srcdir==builddir.

Beware that SVN versions may behave way less stable than release tarballs, and they may produce invalid or incompatible .bse files. So please do not distribute non-release packages of BEAST/BSE, that would mean putting the enduser's data at risk and produces much unneccessary work for us.