Sialk is in public beta
**Free. macOS. No watermark, no time limit, no nag.** Output is 1280 px on the
long edge — the same as the free tier will be, so what you try is what you keep.
<!--sialk:withholds-->
Sialk is where the work you already make becomes an instrument you can play on
stage — live, audio-reactive, and yours to keep. **The beta plays GLSL and p5**;
Cables.gl, Three.js, Rive and Spline follow, in that order, and Sialk says which
version each one arrives in rather than loading it and hoping. Your sketches run
as layers, the music reaches them through the contract this site documents, and
you mix them from one screen while the output goes to the wall.
<!--sialk:download-->
## What runs today
- **GLSL sketches.** A folder with a `sketch.glsl` in it. Sialk writes the
page, compiles the shader, and hands it the audio as uniforms — no
boilerplate, no loop, no page of your own.
- **p5 sketches.** A folder with a `sketch.js` that declares `setup()` or
`draw()` — the shape the p5 editor exports. Sialk supplies p5 itself, so one
file is a whole layer and none of it needs the network.
- **Layers.** Your sketches, composited live, with opacity, four blend modes and
per-layer enable.
- **The audio contract.** `window.sialk` is present before your first line runs,
in every layer — loudness, three bands, a spectrum, onsets, tempo and the
phase of the beat, as ordinary numbers.
- **Parameters, as a readout.** A sketch declares what it exposes — numbers,
switches, menus, colours, triggers — and each appears on the surface with its
live value. In the beta they are meters: you watch a sketch play itself.
Playing them by hand arrives at v1, with the modulators they are the base
for.
- **A clean output.** A sketch's own control panel — lil-gui, dat.GUI,
Tweakpane — is kept out of the picture the audience sees.
- **One screen, and it is the wall.** The layer stack, the parameters, and the
output itself — not a preview of it, because there is one output and nothing
it could differ from. One button puts it fullscreen on the wall.
- **Show files.** A whole mix — layers, values, placement — saved and reopened
as a `.sialk` file. A sketch you have edited since is reported, not silently
reverted; one that has moved keeps its place in the stack.
- **A run log.** Every run writes one, without being asked, to
`~/Documents/Sialk/logs/`.
## What you need
- **macOS on Apple Silicon.**
- **A GPU.** Sialk composites on the GPU and has no software fallback by design.
Where a machine cannot do it, Sialk says so plainly rather than showing you
something slow and calling it the product.
- **Something making sound.** Sialk listens to an input device. Without one it
still runs; the sketches simply sit still.
## Opening it the first time
**It is not signed by Apple yet**, so macOS will refuse it once. This is the
one thing about the beta that needs a paragraph rather than a sentence, and
the old advice to right-click and choose *Open* no longer works: Apple removed
that route in macOS Sequoia.
Move **Sialk** to your Applications folder, then open Terminal and run:
```
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Sialk.app
```
That removes the flag your browser attached when it downloaded the file.
Sialk then opens by double-clicking, every time, like anything else.
**Do both parts.** Opened straight out of the download folder with the flag
still on it, macOS runs Sialk from a hidden read-only copy of itself somewhere
in `/private/var/folders` — a feature called app translocation. It works, but
you are no longer running the file you can see, so replacing that file does not
change what opens. Moving it and clearing the flag is what makes Sialk the
application on your disk rather than a snapshot of one.
If you would rather not use Terminal: double-click Sialk, let macOS refuse it,
then go to **System Settings → Privacy & Security**, scroll to the bottom, and
press **Open Anyway**.
Signing and notarisation arrive with v1, and then neither of these is
necessary.
## If something breaks
Every run writes a log to `~/Documents/Sialk/logs/`. It records the machine, the
frame rate, dropped frames, per-layer transfer counts and memory — and nothing
about you, your sketches or their content.
<!--sialk:contact-->