A simple, quick to launch metronome application written in Rust by Peter Wells for CS-510: Rust Programming in Fall 2023 at Portland State University.
It is built with Rodio to control the audio, Spin Sleep to ensure accurate timing and Ratatui to give it a nice Terminal UI.
Ready Metronome is a lightweight terminal based metronome application. It is designed to load quickly and get a metronome ticking fast.
Background: I am both a programmer and a drummer. As such, I find myself wanting to use a flexible, lightweight metronome application while I am at the computer with a few moments to spare. Having this will allow any musician to quickly start practicing without having to open a resource intensive audio application (typically a DAW like Ableton) in order to have a metronome. I want to provide this so that there is one less barrier for musicians at the keyboard to start practicing.
Note: Yes I know google has a metronome, I find it is not very flexible and I aim to make a better one.
Note: Due to some limitations with Cargo Build, these instructions are a little more involved than you might expect. I plan on making this easier in the future with actual installers
- You will need Rust. Be sure to install that first!
- Clone this repository with
git clone https://github.com/unfinishedideas/ReadyMetronome.git - Navigate to the project root directory (
cd ReadyMetronome) and runcargo build -rto make a release build - This is the weird step! Due to cargo refusing to copy over the
EmeryBoardClick.wavfile, you must run the application from the project root directory in a terminal window. Once there, run it with./target/release/readymetronome.exe. (or\'s if you are on windows) If you see an error when starting the metronome withtthen quit the program and ensure you are in the correct directory. Alternatively, you can copy the./assetsfolder to/target/releaseand run it normally.
Alternatively, You can run this program in debug mode by cloning the repo down and simply running it with cargo run
First, run the generated file you created in the above steps in a terminal.
Often there is help text in the bottom right quardrant of the user interface to guide you. But here are some basic commands to get you started.
- Use the arrow keys or tab / shift-tab to navigate menus
- Press 'enter' to make a selection
- Press 'esc' to back out of a menu
- Press 'q' to quit at any time
- Press 't' when not editing a value to toggle the metronome on and off
When changing one of the metronome settings a pop up editor window will open. Simply enter the new value you wish to use and press enter. If you enter an invalid value, the notification area will inform you.
- Between 20-500 bpm
- Between 1.0 - 200.0 for volume (measured in %)
Admittedly, testing was not my primary focus when building this as learning how to set up Ratatui took a good portion of my brainpower. I primarily tested through trial and error while using the application and cleaning up any edge cases with the code. I have gone back and added an error flag to app.rs to give the main event loop a way to gracefully exit without blowing up as well as some tests to check that application functions behave as expected.
I found that making this app was quite fun. While it took a long time to understand how it is set up, setting up Ratatui helped to really bring this app alive. Following their JSON Editor helped to solidify the ideas. With the actual multi-threaded audio processing I found that using the Rodio library and Arc(Atomic)'s greatly simplified the process and was up and running relatively quickly in the process which emboldened me to try to set up the tui.
Due to the complexity of the code I didn't really get around to writing good thorough testing. Rather, I simply tried to break the program in as many ways as possible as I worked on it and patched holes. This is largely due to the fact that it took me a long time to undertand just how these pieces of Ratatui are put together. Additionally, the line count on a lot of these files really ballooned to extreme preportions. I am sure there are plenty of ways to simplify the code; event.rs and ui.rs especially feel rather bloated. I chuck this up to not understanding Ratatui enough yet to break it down into more readible chunks; but also UI code tends to multiply in size as complexity increases.
Overall, I am very satisfied with the result! I accomplished what I set out to accomplish, a simple to use and fast to launch metronome application. Though there is still more to be done.
I would lke to improve test coverage and split out the functionality of some of these files (especially event.rs and ui.rs) so that it is easier to read. I found myself slowing down while working on it because there was so much code to parse, especially in the ui. I also really want to add some of the planned features below with Portable Installers as a priority to fix up the problem with cargo build -r being unable to copy my audio file. I eventually want to add loading of custom click sound files as well since my simple little EmeryBoardClick.wav is not very exciting.
- Portable installers
- TUI-less operation
- Support for custom sounds
- Allow accents and custom time signatures
- Select beats to silence
- Scrolling help text, currently it can cut off on some terminal sizes
- Ratatui
- Ratatui JSON Editor tutorial
- Rodio
- Cross-Platform Audio Library (cpal) (implemented by Rodio)
- Spin Sleep
This project is licensed under the MIT License