A beat is not finished until someone else hears it. The player can keep what you played as a sound file, film the code lighting up for a short clip, or hand out a link that plays your song to anyone, with its knobs and pads to try. Everything here is made on your device; the site only ever keeps the song.
The dot in the top bar, or the R key, starts a recording of everything you hear: both decks, the pads, the snapshots and the master effects, taken after the Volume knob, so what goes into the file is exactly what came out of the speakers. A timer appears beside the dot and counts in minutes and seconds. Press the dot again (or R) to stop, and the file is saved at once. If nothing was playing when you started, the player says so and waits: press play, then press record again to save.
The file is a 16-bit stereo WAV, about 10 MB a minute, named after the song that was playing and the time:
hack-the-beats Night Ferry 2026-10-03-21-14.wav. A recording stops by itself at twenty minutes and saves what
it has; a message at the foot of the screen gives the name and the size. Recording needs an account, and a browser that
can run the audio engine this way (every current one can; an old one says This browser cannot record audio
here).
The same recorder is in the share sheet as Record audio, under More ways to share, for when you are already there deciding how a song should go out.
What it is for: keeping a live mix, with every knob move and pad throw in it, that you could not get back by pressing play again; capturing an improvisation before you tidy the code; or making source material, a few minutes of a beat with the tempo knob eased down, to chop up elsewhere.
A video clip is a short film of the code lighting up in time with the music, the thing people stop scrolling for. Press V, or Make a video clip in the share sheet; there is no permanent button for it, and it is not offered on the page a shared link opens. The spirit of it is simple: make the beat, perform it, post it.
The sheet asks two things.
| Choice | Options |
|---|---|
| Shape | Vertical 9:16, for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, kept clear of the buttons and captions those apps lay over a video; or Square 1:1 |
| Length | 4, 8, 16 or 32 bars, shown as 8 bars · 16 s and so on, worked out from the song's tempo. Only lengths that last between 5 and 90 seconds are offered, and the one nearest 20 seconds is chosen for you |
So at 120 BPM you are offered 4, 8, 16 and 32 bars (8, 16, 32 and 64 seconds); a slow 80 BPM song loses its 32-bar option, and a very fast one loses 4 bars. Under the chips the sheet says what it is about to do: recorded live on this device as the music plays, starting on the next bar, nothing uploaded.
Press Record clip. If the deck is stopped the music starts first; a pill on the stage reads Starting in 4, counting the beats to the next bar line, then Bar 3 of 8 as it goes, then Finishing…. Stop on the pill keeps what is recorded so far, always at least one whole bar; Cancel, or Esc, throws it away. Changing the song while a clip is recording cancels it too.
What the clip shows is the stage, drawn fresh for the video: the code in its colours, the notes lighting as they sound, the track bars pulsing, knob and switch numbers in orange, the inline visuals under their lines, muted tracks dimmed, and the view scrolling to follow the music. Around the code sit the song's title, its @by credit, the tempo in BPM, a bar counter, a small scope of the mix, the site's mark and the song's address, so whoever sees the clip knows where to go and play it. The sound is the mix before the Volume knob, so the clip is at full level whatever your speakers were doing.
When it is done the sheet plays the clip back, with its format, size and length underneath, as in
MP4 · 1080 × 1920 · 4.2 MB · 16 s, and four buttons: Share… where the device has a share menu
that takes files (a phone, usually), Download, Make another and Discard. The
file is called hack-the-beats Night Ferry clip 2026-10-03-21-20.mp4. It is an MP4 at 1080p where the browser can
write one, otherwise WebM at 720p, and in both cases 30 frames a second. Nothing leaves your device: the frames are drawn
and the file is written there.
Clips need an account and a browser with the video recorder built in: Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all have it, and a
browser without it says This browser cannot record video here. The visuals a song draws across the whole
window (.scope() without the underscore, and its kind) are not in a clip; the inline ones are.
The link icon in the top bar, or Share… in a song's ⋯ menu in the song list, opens the share sheet. What it offers depends on whose song is on the deck.
For a song of your own there is a switch, Share by link: anyone with the link can listen. Switch it on and the sheet makes a share link, with Copy beside it and Share… where the device has a share menu. Until then the sheet says what the switch does: anyone who has the link can play your song; nobody else can find it. The link is the song's own address on the player, a random identifier that says nothing about the song or about you.
The link always plays the song's latest saved version, which is why the sheet warns you when the deck holds changes you have not saved: You have changes that are not saved. The link plays the last saved version, with a Save and share button that does both. Save again later and the same link plays the new version; there is nothing to re-send.
Switching sharing off closes the link for good. Switching it on again makes a new link, so anyone who kept the old one finds a page that says the link no longer works and that its owner may have switched sharing off. Keep that in mind before you switch it off to tidy up.
A built-in beat is not yours to share in the same way, and the sheet says so. The better link is to a copy of your own, so the first offer is Save as my song and share: your copy gets its own title and picture wherever the link is pasted. Below that, Or share the beat itself gives a mix link: the beat's own page, carrying your knob and switch positions, channel levels and tempo, without any edits to the code. A featured beat's mix link needs no account to open; a beat that is open to members only says that people will need to sign in, free, to play it.
Whoever opens your link lands on the shared song's page. It names you as the person who shared it and says what the song is: code, running live in their browser. They can press play and work the knobs, channels and pads; nothing they do changes your song, and nothing they do is kept. If they want it for themselves, Edit a copy takes them to the main site, where, once signed in, the question reads Run and keep a copy: one click runs the song and puts a copy in their My songs, marked Remix of your song, by you. Someone else's song can be passed on from the share sheet too, as Share their song, with the warning that the link stops working if they switch sharing off.
While a song is shared, the share sheet shows one more box: Let the site feature this. Ticking it offers the song to the site's editors. If they pick it, its title, your name and its header notes appear under From the community in the song list, where anyone can open it.
The community shelf sits between My songs and Beats, newest first, at most 48 songs, and it is hidden while it is empty. An entry on it holds only what the link already shows: the title, the credit, who shared it, the tempo, the number of tracks, the first lines of the header notes and any remix credit. Never the code, and never the account behind it. Signed out, a featured song plays on the shared-song page; signed in, it opens on the deck behind the same question as any shared song, headed From the community, because its owner may have changed the code since it was picked.
To take a song off the shelf, untick Let the site feature this: it goes at once, and the link itself keeps working for anyone who has it. Switching sharing off or deleting the song takes it off as well, and those close the link too. The site's editors can take a song off the shelf as well, and the admin can switch a song's sharing off, after which its owner cannot share that song again.
Your songs are code, and the song list lets you take them with you. Export, above My
songs, writes every song you have into one file, named hack-the-beats-songs-2026-10-03.json, in strudel.cc's own JSON format, so the same file imports at
strudel.cc, into another account here, or into a local copy of the site. Import reads one back, and it also
reads plain code: a .js, .strudel, .str or .txt file becomes one song,
named from its @title line where it has one, and you can pick several files at once. A message counts what arrived, as in 3 songs added to My songs; none of them runs
until you open one and press play.
Exporting changes nothing: the songs stay in My songs, still yours, still shared if they were. Importing adds; it never writes over a song you already have. Without an account, songs live in the browser you made them in, which on the live site means a local copy of the site, since My songs itself is behind the sign-in there. Signed in, they are kept in your account and follow you between devices, and the export file is your own copy of all of them, to keep wherever you like.