CtrlBeat is a desktop video editor built for music-driven cuts: detect beats, place images and videos on the grid, add visualizer / ASCII overlays, bake them into the timeline, and export locally.
It is a named product fork of Concat / WolfCut. It is not an official Concat release. See ATTRIBUTION.md.
CtrlBeat layer
- Beat detection with timeline marks (Balanced / Bass / Piano / Dense)
- Place images and videos on beats (loop, beats-per-clip, gap-only duration)
- Lyrics on beats — paste lyrics, group words per beat (karaoke-style), land as text clips
- Music visualizer presets (particles, radial, kaleidoscope, Lissajous, orbit)
- ASCII / code-symbol overlays (13 glyph sets) with live preview
- Bake with a config sheet — pick smoothness, see the frame/time estimate, watch progress, cancel; the overlay bakes as one animated clip (not one still per beat) and re-baking replaces instead of stacking
- Full transition suite — cross-fade, fade to black/white, wipes, push, zoom — all real in preview and export, with apply to selection / every cut one-undo sweeps
- Unified fades — Fade in / Fade out ramp sound and picture together, on clips, stills and titles
- Word-level auto captions — whisper token timing, karaoke-style (Settings → Transcriber → Word by word), phrase mode as before
- Titles take transitions and fades like any visual, end to end
- Freeze frame, duplicate clips, fit/match sizing, video source-start window
- Beats tools live in the Beats panel (not dumped in File)
From the Concat engine
- Multi-track timeline, effects, filters, titles, templates
- On-device captions and TTS hooks
- Local FFmpeg export, no cloud required for core editing
Download page → — or grab the installer directly from GitHub Releases.
- Download CtrlBeat_0.4.0_x64-setup.exe (also available as an MSI)
- If SmartScreen appears: More info → Run anyway (unsigned build)
- Open CtrlBeat from the Start menu
Projects default to Desktop/CtrlBeat. Everything runs locally — no account, no cloud.
A local copy of the installer also lives in releases/ for sharing without GitHub.
| Doc | What it is |
|---|---|
| CTRLBEAT.md | Product identity and quick start |
| ATTRIBUTION.md | Concat / WolfCut credit and license notes |
| FORK_NOTES.md | Engineering changelog for this fork |
| brandkit/ | Logo masters, icons, GitHub / OG assets |
| PR_DRAFTS.md | Draft upstream PRs (freeze / duplicate / fit) |
Prerequisites: Node.js, Rust, Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools + Windows SDK.
cd desktop
npm install
npm run app
Release installer (from a VS Developer / vcvars64 shell):
cd desktop
npx tauri build
Run scripts from desktop/ (repo root has no app script).
Source of truth: brandkit/master/*.svg. Regenerate sized assets:
cd brandkit/tools
npm install
npm run render
Then refresh Tauri icons from brandkit/app/icon-512.png (see brandkit/README.md).
CtrlBeat is Windows desktop today. For phones, use CapCut, kneecap, or LibreCuts.
AGPL-3.0-or-later for the combined CtrlBeat product (Path 2). See LICENSE, path map in NOTICE, credit in ATTRIBUTION.md, and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
Do not treat this repo as MIT. CtrlBeat is a full-app fork of Concat / WolfCut. Concat's plugin exception does not apply. AGPL includes a network clause: if you modify CtrlBeat and let others use it over a network, you must offer them the corresponding source.
End users editing videos on their own machine have no extra paperwork. Obligations apply to forks, redistribution, embedding, and hosting.