BEAST is a powerful music composition and modular synthesis application released as free software under the GNU LGPL that runs under Unix.

It supports a wide range of standards in the field, such as MIDI, WAV/AIFF/MP3/OggVorbis/etc audio files and LADSPA modules. It has excellent technical abilities like multitrack editing, unlimited undo/redo support, real-time synthesis support, 32bit audio rendering, full duplex support, multiprocessor support, conditional MMX/SSE utilisation for plugins, precise timing down to sample granularity, on demand and partial loading of wave files, on the fly decoding, stereo mixing, FFT scopes, MIDI automation and full scriptability in scheme.

The plugins, synthesis core and the user interface are actively being developed

Changes in v0.8.2

• Introduced Rapicorn1307 dependency.
• Establish Aida remote interfacing between Beast and BSE.
• Removed birnet/ sublibrary entirely, replaced with Rapicorn uses.
• Added support for loading and saving of FLAC encoded samples. [stw]
• Ported code to use Rapicorn's type safe cxxprintf instead of vprintf.
• Lots of documentation improvements and fixes.
• Automatization of documentation builds documentation uploads.
• Beast now ships complete documentation builds in tarballs.

Changes in v0.8.0

• Now uses Rapicorn library, requires version 13.0.0.
• Adapted IDL types to other projects
• Adapted code to make use of C++11 and STL threads.
• Various performance improvements through EventFD, Spinlocks, lambdas, etc.
• Improved documentation
• Bugfix for printf format-security issues (#665097). [Alessio Treglia]
• Various code cleanups and licensing cleanups.

Changes in v0.7.6

• Packaging fixups, download and integrate documentation from beast wiki.
• Work around regressions introduced in recent GLib and GTK+ versions.
• Various bug and leak fixups.
• Moved lots of code to C++.
• Build documentation with doxygen.
• Code fixups for g++-4.4, g++-4.7.
• Improved DavOrgan frequency handling.

Changes in v0.7.4

• Renamed the project to Better Audio System / Better Sound Engine
• Moved project website to: http://beast.testbit.eu/
• Various build system fixes [stw,timj]
• License fixups for some scripts [stw]
• Fixed subnormal tests on AMD64 if SSE unit is in DAZ mode [stw]
• Replaced slow resampler checks with a much faster resampling test [stw]
• Performance improvements for various tests [stw]
• GLib 2.28 unit test porting [stw]
• Speed improvements for record field name [stw]
• Fixed XRUNs in ALSA driver on 64bit systems [timj]
• Added beast.doap [Jonh Wendell]
• PO handling improvements.
• Updated German translation.
• Updated Norwegian bokmål translation [Kjartan Maraas]
• Added e-Telugu translation [Veeven]