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I'm looking for a software drum machine that's easy to work with programatically. My goal is to use this as an intelligent metronome for creating drills to practice against.

Simplistically, I want to be able to lay out a drum pattern, then be able to code against it sort of like this:

"patternfile=./my_pattern.txt"

tempo = 40 while tempo <= 40 play pattern 30 times tempo = tempo + 1 end

Does anybody know of anythicn like this which already exists?

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You might find the answers to this question useful. – luser droog Jan 18 at 4:52
In case you're totally lost, I'd start with a MIDI synth (like IIRC timidity but google-around you know?), and look for a midi library that lets you build sequences and dispatch them. – luser droog Jan 18 at 7:13
I would guess that pretty much all (software) drum machines and sequencers are controllable through MIDI, so using some MIDI API (for Ruby) you should be able to feed them appropriate tempo change messages at times of your choice by also listening to timing messages from the MIDI device. – Ulf Åkerstedt Jan 18 at 15:56
Per the FAQ, shopping recommendations are off-topic. – Luke Jan 21 at 19:25

closed as off topic by Luke, Monica Cellio, Dr Mayhem♦, Wheat Williams, Andrew Mar 4 at 21:35

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3 Answers

up vote -1 down vote

For Ruby: Archaeopteryx and Midilib

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Can you explain why these would be good choices? – Luke Feb 13 at 22:40
While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. – Dave Jun 7 at 13:59
up vote 2 down vote

Try `beats' library(gem) of Ruby scripts. http://beatsdrummachine.com

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up vote 1 down vote

Not exactly what you want, but perhaps useful: Midge. It creates midi files from textual description. It should be easy to use any language you want to create the text files as input for midge.

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