[Announcement] Beatmeter Generator 0.3.0

[armobit]

Sweet, thanks! I can finally try this out.

[SilverSlut]

Hey, I've looked around a bunch and I can't seem to find any tips, tricks, or instructions about how to load custom graphics into Beatmeter Generator. Does anyone around here know how to do that?

[flyingcactus]

Hey, I've looked around a bunch and I can't seem to find any tips, tricks, or instructions about how to load custom graphics into Beatmeter Generator. Does anyone around here know how to do that?

There is no way that I know of without messing up with the jar file, or compiling your own (I could be wrong, feel free to correct me). The beatmeter-generator.jar file that you will find in your install folder is just a compressed file (like a zip) that packages all of the Java class files and other assets required for the program to run. Leaving the mumbo jumbo aside, if you open the jar file with a program like 7zip (or winrar or whatever you use) you will see a lot of folders like so:

bmgen.PNG (69.65 KiB) Viewed 5212 times

The folders you are probably interested in are:

• beats folder: This is where the wav files for the sound effects live

• meter folder: This is where the svg assets live for the "flying" and "waveform" templates that the app provides

Basically just modify the files in those folders keeping the names and formats (just drag and drop your replacement files into the 7zip window) and that will update the jar file, which should now be using your custom files.

I'm recommending 7zip for this because I know it works fine and it's free, there could be other programs that mess up with the file and make the jar not runnable anymore (no big deal, you can just reinstall, or keep a backup of the original one).

Hope that was somewhat useful

[kerkersklave]

There is no way that I know of without messing up with the jar file, or compiling your own

You can set a directory in the dialog with the beatmeter settings. This directory has to contain the same files as the files as the respective directory in the jar file. Also, if you want to be able to set colors using the dialog, you need to mark the respective elements using css-classes in the jar file. But that's probably not that useful.

The feature is not documented anywhere as nobody asked so far.
But it should work.

[flyingcactus]

There is no way that I know of without messing up with the jar file, or compiling your own

You can set a directory in the dialog with the beatmeter settings. This directory has to contain the same files as the files as the respective directory in the jar file. Also, if you want to be able to set colors using the dialog, you need to mark the respective elements using css-classes in the jar file. But that's probably not that useful.

The feature is not documented anywhere as nobody asked so far.
But it should work.

Lol, I was too lazy to look at the code and just hacked my way in . Love your tool btw, without it I'd never have gotten around to create something, thanks

[kerkersklave]

Lol, I was too lazy to look at the code and just hacked my way in . Love your tool btw, without it I'd never have gotten around to create something, thanks

Thank you. My main motivation was to get more cockheros with a beatmeter. And it worked

[tigrotto]

Not sure if I'm really bad at all this, but the links to both the Windows and platform independent versions in gitlab is bringing up a 404, and I'm not exactly sure what to do with the source code that I downloaded lol.

For some reason Gitlab had deleted all the build artifacts. I reran the build and they are back now.
I'm not sure when and why that happened. If it happens again I have to investigate.

It happened again. Someone asked in the milovana subreddit about it.

[kerkersklave]

It happened again. Someone asked in the milovana subreddit about it.

Thank's for letting me know. I've fixed it again. Apparently Gitlab deletes build artifacts after a month now. I''ve scheduled the build pipeline to run once a month now. But Gitlab as a service seems to be on the decline, they also announced to "archive" "inactive" projects now after a year. So I might have to move beatmeter generator to Github or something.

[tigrotto]

Thank's for letting me know.

You're welcome.

[bababuii]

Hi all! Need some help!

From tutorial on the download page:

22. Select "Tools->Generate Audio" and "Tools->Generate Video" to generate both.


When i generate Video i get about 20k png pics ....my video programs can not have that many files imported.....am i doing something wrong to get that many files or...?


Oh, and the sound file i get is not working on any video creator program ive tried....it does not even have a file name, like .mp4 or what not...

[SilverSlut]

Hi all! Need some help!

From tutorial on the download page:

22. Select "Tools->Generate Audio" and "Tools->Generate Video" to generate both.


When i generate Video i get about 20k png pics ....my video programs can not have that many files imported.....am i doing something wrong to get that many files or...?


Oh, and the sound file i get is not working on any video creator program ive tried....it does not even have a file name, like .mp4 or what not...

Heya!

The program is working as intended. The play with those images is not to import them into the project as images, but to select them all and just drag them right onto your timeline. Doing it that way will import them as a video clip, with each image being 1 frame. Make sure your project framerate matches the export framerate in the beatmeter, or your audio won't match up!!

What video editor are you using? I'm using DaVinci Resolve and sometimes it doesn't like me draggin in a billion images. The solution is just to drag in about half of them at a time and then link them like you would any other clips.

As for the audio, that's a much easier solution. It exports as a "file" with no suffix, and I found out that you can easily just give it a suffix. If you simply rename it and add ".wav" to the end, it works immediately. ".mp3" causes some wierd issues, so use ".wav" for sure.

Hope this helps!

[doremi]

As for the audio, that's a much easier solution. It exports as a "file" with no suffix, and I found out that you can easily just give it a suffix. If you simply rename it and add ".wav" to the end, it works immediately. ".mp3" causes some wierd issues, so use ".wav" for sure.

When in doubt, everyone, you can use the mediainfo free app/tool. The file type will be listed in the top data lines. Btw, it works wonder on files in the browser cache.

[3xTripleXXX]

As for the audio, that's a much easier solution. It exports as a "file" with no suffix, and I found out that you can easily just give it a suffix. If you simply rename it and add ".wav" to the end, it works immediately. ".mp3" causes some wierd issues, so use ".wav" for sure.

It's because it's a wav file and not an mp3, which are two different sound formats. Wav is uncompressed, while mp3 is a specific way of compressing sound to make it take less space. They're not interchangeable at all. But yeah, just add .wav to the filename and it should be fine, as you say. :)

When i generate Video i get about 20k png pics ....my video programs can not have that many files imported.....am i doing something wrong to get that many files or...?

What is generated is an image sequence, which is just a big collection of files. Video is just many images in a row, shown at a specific speed (typically 24 to 60 images per second, or frames per second), and the image sequence is all of those images separately.

As mentioned above, just about any video editor should be able to import an image sequence. In Premiere Pro, you just use Import Media, select the first image in the sequence and then click the little checkmark button to tell it that it's an image sequence before you click the load button.

In DaVinci Resolve, you also Import Media, but select all the images and click load and it should automatically understand that there's an image sequence. If it fails and loads lots of individual images, there's a selection in one of the top menus where you can force it to always treat images as an image sequence (I don't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but it's pretty obvious when you see it--if you're having issues, let me know and I'll find it for you).

I don't have experience with other video editors, but any serious editor should have some way of importing an image sequence, and that's the industry term for it, so if you're using something else, just google those together.

[kerkersklave]

I just want to add my reasoning why beatmeter generator generates image sequences: png is lossless and it supports alpha channels, so it is perfect for graphics like beatmeters. I tried to generate videos directly, but then there are many choices for the format and most do not support alpha channels well and are lossy. One could work with a fixed background color instead of an alpha channel but in combination with some lossy compression this can cause annoying artifacts when mixing the resulting video with other videos.

As for the wav format: it is just extremely easy to generate wave audio and it is lossless as well, so there won't be any distortion added by beatmeter generator. It is always best to avoid to many lossy compression steps if possible. There are other lossless formats, but wav was the easiest to handle and it is supported basically everywhere.

[zebbg69]

... you can use the mediainfo free app/tool... Btw, it works wonder on files in the browser cache.

Brilliant!