Reference

What is in the beta

Honestly, and with the release each missing piece arrives in.

The beta is a real build of the instrument, not a demo: free, macOS, no watermark, no time limit, no account. Each missing piece is named with the release it arrives in, never a date.

What works today

  • Layers. Add, mix, blend, order, remove. GLSL, p5, and video clips (H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1; not HAP or ProRes), with Speed and Restart as parameters.
  • The audio. Loudness, bands, spectrum, onsets, tempo, and drums split from notes, reaching every layer through the contract.
  • The output. Fullscreen on a second display, letterboxed, at frame rate, uncapped: your screen's own size, 4K included.
  • Shows. ⌘S and ⇧⌘S, with missing sketches surviving a save.
  • The Inspector, playable: every control a visual declares, live, as a fader, a switch, a colour or a trigger. A library shader's controls come from the visual.json beside it.
  • Logging, every run, to ~/Documents/Sialk/logs/.

What is not in the beta yet

Arrives in
Modulation - the + audio and + LFO stacks v1
Placing a layer - scale, position, rotation v1
Driving a sketch's own panel - lil-gui and dat.GUI knobs as parameters v1
Layers from an address - pasting or dropping a URL v1
Building a source folder - a Vite or CRA tree with no node_modules v1
Playing the pointer - Pointer X/Y and Click as parameters v1
Per-stem audio input - the Sialk: Connect plugin on a DAW track (with the DAW's own tempo), or a multichannel device with one instrument per channel pair; read by sketches as audio.stems v1
The build view - the four-column arrangement on V v1
Filtering the parameter list - the all / bound / moving pills v2, with MIDI
A separate output preview - a picture that can differ from the wall v4

Panels are kept out of the output in every edition, including this one. More kinds of sketch follow: Three.js, Cables.gl, Rive, Spline, in that order. Drop one on Sialk today and it says coming soon.

What the beta is for

Finding out what breaks on a machine that is not the one it was built on, and whether this is worth anyone's evening. The feedback page takes a run log and a sentence.