dbeep - a database of beep tunes

beep is a Linux utility to play sounds through the PC speaker

dbeep is a collection of scripts that play nice tunes through beep.

Requirements

• beep: install via your package manager, or get it at https://github.com/johnath/beep/

• A shell that supports arrays (bash, zsh, ...)

Usage

To play a tune, just execute the corresponding script.

Adding new tunes

The core infrastructure is in file dbeep.inc.sh. The principle of dbeep is to compose a beep command-line using one of the note helper functions, and then call the dbeep function to execute that command-line.

There is a generic note function that accepts a frequency, note length, and optional delay after the note. If you transcode a tune from sheet music, you can use one of the following convenience wrappers around note:

• nnote (normal-length note)
• dnote (dotted note)
• tnote (triplet note)
• lnote (long note, same as nnote but with a difference ratio of note length to delay)
• ldnote (long dotted note)
• ltnote (long triplet note)

All these wrappers take as first argument the note length number (1=whole note, 2=half note, 4=quarter note, etc.) and as second argument the note frequency.

dbeep.inc.sh defines the frequencies for all musical notes in various octaves. For example ${C[3]} refers to a C note in the third octave, and ${C[4]} is the same note but one octave higher.

See the contents of dbeep.inc.sh for more details.

A skeleton dbeep file is:

#!/bin/bash

# (Copyright and license information)

. $(dirname $(readlink -f $0))/dbeep.inc.sh

# (note calls)

dbeep

TODO

• Add uniform script argument to speed up/down, and to switch octave up/down
• Use a more compact format, perhaps Nokia Composer format
• Add better handling of pauses

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Upstream source is:
https://github.com/patrickdepinguin/dbeep

When adding new tunes, please indicate the source and copyright information. See existing scripts for examples.