Getting started

struDAWl runs in the browser. There is nothing to install, no account, and no upload — your song stays on your machine unless you export it yourself.

Bring a song in

There are three ways to start, and none of them is “from an empty canvas”:

1. Open a bundled song. The Songs tab in the left sidebar carries twenty-nine, filed on four shelves. They are meant to be taken apart.
2. Paste Strudel source. Anything that runs on strudel.cc can be imported, hand-written or generated.
3. Open a file you exported earlier — either the .strudel source or the .loom.json document, which reopens with your layout and motifs intact.

Play it

Press play in the top bar. The transport follows the arrangement timeline along the bottom: drag the ruler to loop a section, ctrl+wheel to zoom, drag the divider to resize it.

Seeking is not gapless. Strudel’s scheduler has no seek, so jumping to a cycle recompiles the pattern with an offset and restarts. Loop wrap-around behaves the same way.

Change one thing

Pick the lead instrument’s card on the canvas and change its generator. That is the whole point of the tool: the thing you want to change is a labelled control on a card, rather than the fourth .s() in a sixty-line chain.

Get it out

The Export tab gives you four things — the code, a loop-ready mix WAV, per-layer stems, or one zip with all of it and a manifest. If you are taking this into an engine, take the zip; see Export and stems.

Where to go next

• How importing works — and the two promises it makes about your file.
• Layers, chains and motifs — the model everything else sits on.
• Submixes — buses, and what routing does to a card’s effects.
• The arrangement timeline — how on/off flags become a mask.