General Information
===================

This is a development version of BEAST/BSE, the BEdevilled Audio SysTem
and the Bedevilled Sound Engine. BEAST is a powerful music composition
and modular synthesis application released as free software under the
GNU GPL and GNU LGPL, that runs under unix.
Much more information about the project can be found at the website and
in the documents and manuals shipped with release tarballs.

Beast is a soft realtime application which needs elevated CPU
scheduling priorities. It installs a small suid wrapper which
acquires nice level -20 and then immediately drops privileges.
For linux kernels of the 2.6.x series, this enables the low-latency
scheduling behavior needed to avoid audio drop outs, this kernel
series is therefore recommended for operating Beast.

In order to build release tarballs, you need Gtk+-2.6, a recent version
of the Gtk+-2.6 based GnomeCanvas, Guile-1.6 and the Ogg/Vorbis
Codec libraries.
Though optional, it is a good idea to also have libmad (MPEG audio
decoder library) around when compiling BEAST.
Most distributions already ship with these packages,
the sources can be found at:

GnomeCanvas (use >= 2.4):
  ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libgnomecanvas/
Gtk+-2.6:
  ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.6/
Guile-1.6:
  http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html
Ogg/Vorbis (at least version 1.0):
  http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/download/
MAD (BSE requires libmad-0.15.1b):
  http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/

The official ftp site for BEAST/BSE is:
  ftp://beast.gtk.org/pub/beast

The official web site for BEAST/BSE is:
  http://beast.gtk.org/

There also is a mailing list for the project (beast@gnome.org):
  http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/beast/

And a related IRC channel:
  #beast on GimpNet (irc.gimp.org:6666)

BEAST also supports the LADSPA plugin API, so various kinds of third
party plugins can be loaded and executed by BEAST. LADSPA plugins are
available from:
	http://www.ladspa.org
and places linked there from. BEAST will look for LADSPA plugins under
lib/ladspa/ of it's own installation prefix, and in the directories
listed in $LADSPA_PATH.


Installation
============

Note that Beast has to be fully installed to function properly, and that
the binaries built in the launchers/ directory have to be installed with
permissions of the root user.
For generic installation instructions, see the file `INSTALL'.
