Install battuta

battuta is a desktop application. It reads and writes MEI files on your own disk, needs no account, and makes no network requests — nothing you open leaves your machine.

Download a build

Bundles are attached to each GitHub release.

Linux

Two bundles, both 64-bit x86:

• battuta_<version>_amd64.deb — the small one (~6 MB); it uses the WebKitGTK already on your system.

  sudo apt install ./battuta_0.0.1_amd64.deb

• battuta_<version>_amd64.AppImage — self-contained (~81 MB, WebKitGTK bundled); no install step.

  chmod +x battuta_0.0.1_amd64.AppImage
  ./battuta_0.0.1_amd64.AppImage

MIDI input goes through ALSA. The .deb declares that dependency, so it comes in with the package; if you use the AppImage on a minimal system and the status bar never finds your keyboard, install your distribution’s ALSA runtime.

macOS

Download the .dmg, open it, drag battuta to Applications.

The disk image is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so Gatekeeper warns you the first time. Open it from Finder’s context menu → Open to get the “open anyway” choice, or clear the quarantine flag yourself:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/battuta.app

Verified on Apple Silicon: the app launches, .mei files open by double-click, and MIDI keyboards hot-plug through CoreMIDI.

Windows

Download the NSIS installer (battuta_<version>_x64-setup.exe). It bootstraps Microsoft’s WebView2 runtime if the machine doesn’t have it.

Untested platform

Windows bundles come out of the same release build as the others, but battuta has not had a test round on Windows yet. Expect rough edges — and please report them.

Opening .mei files by double-click

The Linux packages register *.mei as application/x-mei+xml and hand the clicked file to battuta, so double-clicking a score in your file manager opens it in a new tab. macOS does the same through the app bundle. If a file manager still opens .mei in a text editor, set battuta as the default application for the type once — the association is registered, the preference is yours.

Run from source

Useful for trying the editor without installing anything: the frontend is a plain web app and runs in any modern browser (Chromium and Firefox both work; Web MIDI needs Chromium).

1. Get the sources and dependencies — Node 22 or newer:

   git clone https://github.com/vibetuned/battuta.git
   cd battuta
   npm install

2. Start the editor:

   npm run dev --workspace @battuta/editor

3. Open the printed URL. In a browser, open file… and ctrl + s fall back to a file picker and a download instead of native dialogs; everything else behaves the same.

Building the desktop shell

The desktop app is Tauri 2. Building it needs Rust plus the platform’s webview and audio headers — on Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev libasound2-dev \
  librsvg2-dev build-essential curl wget file libssl-dev

Then:

npm run build -w @battuta/core
npm run build -w @battuta/editor
cd apps/editor && npx tauri build

The bundles land in apps/editor/src-tauri/target/release/bundle/. The binary prints at startup whether it is serving embedded assets or talking to the dev server, so you always know which one you launched.

What’s next

• A tour of the window — every control, named.
• Your first score — from blank to a phrase you can hear.