GMetronome is a free/libre software metronome and tempo measurement tool for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

• Tempo range from 30 to 250 BPM
• Customizable accent patterns with three levels of accentuation
• Divisible beats for simple and compound meters
• Predefined patterns for widely used meters and time signatures
• Training function (smoothly increase or decrease tempo)
• Profile support (save/restore settings)
• Build-in synthesizer to customize click sounds
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts
• Support for various audio backends

GMetronome is distributed as compressed source tarball and can be downloaded from our releases page.

To build GMetronome you need a couple of packages:

• GTK (3.24) and Glib (2.58)
• gtkmm (3.24)
• pkgconfig

Use your distributions package manager to install those packages.

GMetronome comes with built-in support for various audio frameworks and sound servers. Depending on the target platform and user requirements, there may occur other dependencies like:

• libpulse (PulseAudio support)
• libasound (native ALSA support on Linux)
• sys/soundcard.h (OSS support on FreeBSD, Linux, ...)

Install those packages according to your needs as well.

After unpacking the source tarball (gmetronome-0.x.x.tar.bz2), you need to configure the package. If you want to install GMetronome in the default location (e.g. in /usr/local) with the default audio backends just run the following command inside the package directory:

$ ./configure

To install GMetronome in a different location or with a different set of audio backends use the --prefix option and the audio backend switches of the configure script, e.g.:

$ ./configure --prefix=/my/install/dir --with-oss --without-pulseaudio

All configure options can be shown with ./configure --help.

Since GMetronome uses the NDEBUG macro, it will see a performance benefit if passed to the preprocessor (be aware that this could make possible troubleshooting more difficult):

$ ./configure CPPFLAGS="-DNDEBUG"

After successfully configuring the package you can compile the sources and install the software:

$ make
$ make install

You will need to have write permissions for the installation directories, especially if you want to install the package with a public prefix (e.g. /usr/local). In this case run make install using sudo. You will be asked for the system administrator password to get the necessary write permissions.

$ sudo make install

Before running GMetronome please make sure, that the shared resources can be found by the application. This might not be a problem, if you install the package with the default installation prefix. Otherwise you can prepend the directory to the environment variable XDG_DATA_DIRS. Assuming that your installation prefix was /my/install/dir type:

$ export XDG_DATA_DIRS=/my/install/dir/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS

Then run GMetronome by

$ /my/install/dir/bin/gmetronome

See INSTALL for further details.

To build the current development version, clone the project's git repository:

$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/dqpb/gmetronome.git

Change to the gmetronome directory and call autogen.sh to generate the makefiles. This requires a working autotools (autoconf, automake) installation to succeed.

$ cd gmetronome
$ NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh

Then run the traditional GNU triplet (configure, make, make install) following the description above.

Please visit our project's issues page to view currently open issues or submit new bug reports.