Conductor's Beat Tutorial

First off, I'm pretty computer-saavy and use Linux (read: I'm a big fat geek). I've tried to make this tutorial geared towards the average Windows user. For advanced users, see the Advanced Tutorial

Conductor's Beat is released under the GPLv2.

The first step is to download the program. If you're geeky, you can compile it from source. If not, executables are also available. Click the "Download" link on the side and download the appropriate thing from Sourceforge. If you don't have a clue what Sourceforge is, you probably want to download the one that says, "Windows Executable". Create a new folder called "Metronome" (or whatever else you want) and save the .exe file there. That is the folder where you will put all of your metronome files and where all of your output files will go.

As of now, Conductor's Beat is a command line program. Meaning, you type in the command (with optional arguments) and it does its thing. But don't worry, I'll walk you through the steps to running it.

If you don't want to learn to make a file, you can use the MetroGen Tool for creating a metronome file. Hopefully, this tool will open up Conductor's Beat for people that aren't as computer-saavy as I am. I still recommend learning how to write a metronome file yourself, as it's much faster and powerful. But, whatever you want.

First, though, you need to make a metronome file. Open up a text editor (Notepad, Kate, Emacs, whatevs). The following is a valid metronome file, so copy and paste it into the text editor. (if you want a real-life example, check out the file used to generate the click track for GBHS's 2008 show.

 
# Here is how to write a metronome file for Conductor's Beatwherever you want. (Program Files, maybe, if you're on Windows).
# Lines beginning with "#" are comments and are ignored. 
# There is one instruction per line

# Parenthesis set the tempo in beats per minute:
# To create a measure, simply put the number of beats in the measure
# To make multiple measures with the same number of beats, put a space after the first number, followed
# by the number of measures with that number of beats.
# If x is the beats per measure, "x" is the same as "x 1" (one measure of x beats)
# You can change beats per measure and tempos at any time.
# A tilde (~) signals a gradual tempo change (ie, ritardando, accel.)
# It must be placed on a line of its own
# The tempo change will start at the next measure and end at the next tempo change

(136)
~
4 4
2
4
3
(90)
5 2
~
3
# Start part 2
(212)
4 12
2 2
7

# In the above sample, the tempo starts at 136 bpm and starts a rit. Four measures of 4/4, a measure of 2/4, 4/4, 3/4.
# Then, the tempo changes to 90 bpm with 2 measures of 5/4.
# The next 3/4 measure would start an accel. (albeit somewhat ridiculous) to 212 bpm, 12 of 4/4, 2 of 2/4, then a 7/4

As you can see, you can put comments on a new line and say whatever you want to help you keep track of where you are in the song.

Save this file as tutorial.txt and close the text editor.

Now, go to your Metronome folder, or whatever you called it back at the beginning. Run the .exe file that's chilling there. A black box should pop up. It will ask you for an input file. You should then type in whatever metronome file you want to convert to a sound file (tutorial.txt, for example) and press enter. Do the same for the output file and call it something like tutorial.wav (Windows users: make sure you put the .wav extension for now. In later versions, you won't have to, but for now, you'll definitely want to remember the file extension. If you forget, you can always rename it and give it a .wav extension.)

The program should do its thing and create the file. The box might close...don't worry. The sound file should be there in the same folder as the program.

Advanced Tutorial

If you know what you're doing, you don't have to go through all that. You can put your .exe anywhere you want, preferably somewhere in your PATH (or, if you can, add this folder to your PATH). A good place would be in the system32 folder. You can use commandline arguments now, and specify the input and output files to be whatever you want. The format is this:

conductorsbeat [input file] [output file]