TICK - Professional Open-Source Metronome

CURRENT STATE:

Since I do this in my spare (which became more limited with COVID19, small kids), This is on-going WIP.

I do it too slowly. (mostly fiddeling with responsive UI to be good enough for mobile and desktop).

Having said that, the metronome plug-in been used on-stage for a while now. And it's still very usable.

Background:

If you ever worked with more than one host (DAW), you've discovered each one got their own built-in metronome. Those greatly differ in available sounds and routing capabilities. While many hosts allow sending metronome as MIDI, this requires tedious set-up.

TICK is tailored made to make a small portable Metronome plug-in. It can also work in standalone mode, meaning it can have agnostic time to the host itself.

Features:

• Sample-Accurate Metronome.
• Customizable - You choose exactly how your metronome sounds. Including ability to do basic edits within TICK.
• Portable - TICK is self-contained. As a plug-in, your audio samples are saved in the preset that is part of your audio session/project.
• Low Pass Filter - avoid bleeds while recording.
• True Cross-Platform - TICK is will be available as an audio plug-in or a standalone app for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS & Android as an app.
• Open-Source.
• Open-Standards - TICK preset format is a zip archive with plain WAVE files (containing metadata) along a simple readable XML.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<TICK_SETTINGS presetName="Nerd Readable Format" numOfTicks="2" useHostTransport="0">
  <BEAT index="0" tickId="1" gain="1.0"/>
  ...
  <BEAT index="63" tickId="0" gain="1.0"/>
  <TRANSPORT isPlaying="1" numerator="4" denumerator="4" bpm="120"/>
</TICK_SETTINGS>

Upcoming

• Finish all the corner cases.
• Clean/refactor ugly code.
• Refactor to background thread for some nasty file operations.
• Tomper (nice idea to be explained in the future)
• Ableton Link. Implemented for iOS/iPadOS.
• Improve Full Screen / Tablet UI, use available real-estate properly.

Builds

In order to comply with different restrictions, Some binaries are built/distributed as GPLv3, some are closed source to comply with restrictions (eg. AAX/VST2/iOS).

The TICK codebase though is fully open of course.

License and Binaries

TICK uses JUCE framework.

JUX - During TICK, I've started seeing there are many missing UX elements that would be nice to have with JUCE. so I've separated those to JUX.

TICK itself is MIT. JUCE and VST3 are GPL/dual-licensed.