PhatBeat 1.1 Release Notes
Copyright © 2004 John Chatterton-Papineau
<chattj AT postreal.org>
This software is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or as src/gpl.txt in this distribution. Other licensing arangements may be made by contacting the author. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
- Details
PhatBeat aims to be a simple, attractive, cross-platform beat counter for use by collectors, producers, DJs, and others interested in beat-oriented music. For now it requires users to tap in the beat during listening, after which it calculates and displays the track's BPM and the size of a measure in seconds.
Possible feature additions include being able to listen to the computer's audio input and do BPM calculations from it, as well as fitting in WindowMaker-style application docks.
While the program is running, pressing A will give the program an All Clear, resetting it. Pressing Q exits immediately. Any other key taps in a beat. That is, to determine the BPM of a track, tap any key eight times with the beat, and it will be displayed in the main readout. The number of beats to count can be raised higher than eight if necessary, and the number of beats in each measure can be changed to make the seconds per measure readout correct.
- Installation
Windows users should run the installer executable, currently named PhatBeat-1.0-setup.exe, which includes an install wizard created in Inno Setup 4 (www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php). The current Windows release is 1.0 compared to the Unix release of 1.1 because the .1 release contains only bugfixes for Unix.
Linux users will want to untar the PhatBeat-1.1.tar.gz file in their home directories, which will create a similarly named directory with the source. From there a simple `make;make install` as root should suffice to install the program. If a customized installation or compile is desired, the standard `make clean; make` should work. Users may edit the Makefile if installation to /usr/local is not desired.
PhatBeat's X11 interface makes use of the SDL and SDL_image libraries, so these must be installed before compilation of that program will complete. The console beat counter should compile fine without anything beyond the standard C++ libraries.
For reference, the Windows binary is named 'phat_win.exe', and the linux binaries are 'phatx' for the X version and 'phatbeat' for the interactive console version.
- Portability
PhatBeat is known to compile under Windows in the cygwin environment, and on Redhat Linux versions 8 and 9. Details on this are in the commentary within the makefile. Other platforms supporting the GNU toolchain will probably not have problems compiling either. Binary releases for Windows and x86 Linux should be available at the PhatBeat home page, http://www.postreal.org/phatbeat.