Someone on here mentioned that there’s a Beads reimplementation for the Disting NT. I have been wanting to play with Beads, so I took a look and (with the author’s permission) adapted it for the MetaModule (and VCV Rack). I don’t own a Beads so I don’t know exactly how authentic it is, but it sounds great — the guy who cloned it knows his stuff.
To be clear, this isn’t like the existing Mutable clones because Beads has never been open-sourced – this is an entirely new implementation of the original Beads design.
If anyone wants to play with it, I’d love to hear any bug reports. It works fine for me on VCV and Meta but I’m sure there’s stuff I haven’t tried. (Including the Windows build!)
not really an emulation, dev states “based on the Mutable Instruments Beads manual”, so its aim is functional equivalence rather then be a clone/emulation.
unfortunately, Émilie did not release the beads source code, so we will never know exactly how it was implemented.
when I looked at the source code, what first struck me was how (very!) similar, the code style and structure is to MIs. also it seems also dev uses Claude - so, I wonder if Claude was used to create beads functionality based on MI code base (for other modules) , at least for ‘first draft’
That would have been a really interesting / clever approach.
note: even an LLM cannot emulate Beads however, as Émilie stated she did things very differently (having learnt a lot) for Beads compared to previous projects, and that code has not been open sourced.
ofc, that pure speculation, Claude can also be used simply as a code assistant on your own code base, and similarity could be co-incidence.
anyway, a cool project, however it was created… I love my Beads, so a nice addition.
(and frankly, Ive little hope Émilie will ever release beads source code, but we can hope I guess)
Thanks for this! One question that I haven’t been able to resolve without a Beads of my own. The manual says:
PITCH controls the transposition, from -24 to +24 semi- tones, with virtual notches at selected intervals.
But I can’t find any reference to what those selected intervals are. My guess would be octaves and fifths. Do you remember, or would you mind firing up Beads and checking?
