Technical requirements

We will use some more built-in libraries from the standard Python distribution for this chapter. This includes tkinter, os, math, threading, and pickle modules.

To verify that these modules exist, simply run the following statement in your Python3 IDLE interactive prompt:

 >>> import tkinter, os, math, time, threading, pickle 

This should not cause an error, as Python3 comes with these modules built into the distribution.

Other than this, you need to add an extra Python module called pygame. We will be using the version named 1.9.3 Package, which can be downloaded at http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml.

Linux users may additionally want to take a look at the following page for instructions on getting pygame to work with Python 3.x: http://www.pygame.org/wiki/CompileUbuntu?parent=Compilation.

pygame is a cross-platform package normally used for making games with Python. However, we will just be using a small module from the package named pygame.mixer, which is used for loading and playing sounds. The API documentation for this module can be found at http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/mixer.html.

After you have installed the module, you can verify it by importing it:

>>> import pygame
>>> pygame.version.ver 

If no errors are reported and the version output is 1.9.3, you are ready to program the drum machine. Let's start!