Installing BEATS

Run the following from the command line:

gem install beats

This will download BEATS from rubygems.org and add a beats command to your path.

(Note that if you are installing using the default version of Ruby that comes with MacOS X, you might get a file permission error. If that happens, try sudo gem install beats instead. If you are using RVM, plain gem install beats should work fine.)

The current version of BEATS is 1.2.3. If you have an older version, you can update with this:

gem update beats

Not sure what version you have? Run beats -v.

Drum Sounds

BEATS is not terribly useful unless you have drum sounds to use with it. You can use many 8 and 16-bit wave files as drum sounds. Here are a few collections of sounds to help you get started:

• Hammerhead

  371 sounds extracted from various Hammerhead sound banks using Clawhammer.

  • acoustic_3_1.wav
  • hh_909_clap.wav
  • jungle_3.wav
  • industrial_fx_4.wav

• Casio SA-20

  20 high quality sounds sampled from a Casio SA-20 keyboard I got when I was 8 years old.

  • bass.wav
  • snare.wav
  • hh_closed.wav
  • tom3.wav

Source Code

It’s over at GitHub.

Copyright © 2010-12 Joel Strait