Beat Studio 🥁

Turn your beatbox into music. Record a beat with your mouth, then pull it apart into separate instrument tracks by drawing over the waveform — and build it out into a full arrangement on a live-synced studio grid.

Native Linux desktop app (Python + PySide6). No account, no cloud — it runs on your machine.

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Install (Linux)

One command — it sets up everything in a self-contained environment and adds a Beat Studio launcher to your apps menu:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sebamuhr/BeatStudio/master/install.sh | bash

Prefer to see the code first? Clone, then run the installer:

git clone https://github.com/sebamuhr/BeatStudio.git
cd BeatStudio
./install.sh

That's it. The installer:

• creates a private Python virtualenv (your system Python is left untouched),
• installs the app's dependencies,
• installs the PortAudio system library for sound (asks for your password once, via sudo),
• adds a Beat Studio entry to your applications menu and a beatstudio command.

Optional AI sound-matching (CLAP — suggests which real instrument each of your beats sounds like). It's a large download and not needed to make music:

./install.sh --with-ai

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Launch

• Open your apps menu and search for Beat Studio, or
• run beatstudio in a terminal, or
• run desktop/run.sh from the repo.

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Requirements

• Linux (only platform supported for now — Windows/macOS not yet).
• Python 3.10+ (python3).
• Internet access on first install (to fetch the Python packages).

The installer handles the PortAudio system library automatically on Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and openSUSE. On anything else, install portaudio (a.k.a. libportaudio2) yourself and re-run.

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How it works

• Separation Board — record a take, then draw a line over the waveform for each sound (pen tool). Every drawn peak becomes a hit on the tempo grid, played with that track's instrument. Tools: Pen (draw), Grid (stretch the tempo to match your beat), Fit (stretch a slice of audio onto the beat). Pick Original to play your own recorded sound back through an FX rack (drive, bass, reverb, delay…).
• Studio — the grid of notes, live-synced to the board. Per-track volume automation, play / pause / stop transport, undo/redo across both windows.
• Save / Open — saves a standard .mid (opens in any DAW) plus a full-fidelity .beat sidecar so reopening here restores your synths, FX, and drawings.

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Update

cd BeatStudio && git pull && ./install.sh

Uninstall

rm -rf ~/BeatStudio                                  # or wherever you cloned it
rm -f  ~/.local/share/applications/BeatStudio.desktop
rm -f  ~/.local/bin/beatstudio

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Also in this repo

A small web capture companion (Beatbox to MIDI.dc.html, server.py) — a phone/browser PWA for recording beatbox takes and syncing them over your LAN. Optional; the desktop app stands alone.