13.06.2009 Porting BEAST on Windows

I’ve spent quite some time on producing a Windows Port of BEAST (a sequencer and modular synthesizer, formerly only available for Unixoid systems). Since I got tired of manually configuring / compiling packages, I implemented a python based build system like FreeBSD ports or Gentoo emerge. This build system works fine for BEAST, but it could also be used to maintain other ports of Gtk or Gnome software. Its called BeastBuild and installs everything required to build BEAST, like mingw/msys, gtk+, libguile and portaudio. Finally a user friendly installer is created, so if a user just wants to use BEAST, without building it, he can just simply use the installer. BeastBuild and the BEAST Installer are available here.

3 comments ↓

#1 Andy Wingo on 06.14.09 at 11:34

Neat!

Should you be interested, Guile is going to be coming out with a new release in October. Our first prerelease will be on Friday, and we’d like to keep existing applications happy — so we’d appreciate any bug reports, or even success reports, with the 1.9 snapshots.

http://www.ossau.uklinux.net/guile/snapshots/

Happy hacking 🙂

#2 lariamat on 06.15.09 at 09:15

The beast website says last release was a bugfix on Thursday 28 December 2006. Looks like this project development is dead. But at least it is ported to windows

#3 stw on 06.15.09 at 10:40

Well, there are some new features available in SVN head, so development is still active. In a way, the windows port is also a new feature 🙂

Since the windows port is based on an SVN snapshot, some of the new stuff – mainly multisample instruments like the Retrokit Acoustic Drumkit – might be available to Windows end users before Unix end users have it. This is why the windows installer has the version beast-0.7.2-0.1.2, while the latest released for Unix version is 0.7.1.

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