BEATKNIFE

An instrument for making music videos.

Beatknife is a rhythmic video editor for the Mac. Drop in a song and some footage, and it cuts to the beat on its own — then you play it: reroll, mix scenes in and out, bend speed, stack VHS and glitch effects, lay titles on the grid. It's tuned for music videos and welcoming of happy mistakes.

The Beatknife timeline: a song's waveform, bars, and a strip of clips cut on every beat
Every slot is a beat. The mixer fills them; you reroll what you don't like.
A title with stroke and plate over VHS footage, grabbed in the program monitor
Titles live on the grid and are dragged on the picture.
The scene trimmer: a filmstrip with In and Out handles under the source monitor
Scenes are the atoms. Trim them to the frame, tag them, mix a tag.

What it is

Most editors make you place every cut. Beatknife starts from the music: it finds the tempo and the downbeats, builds a grid, and deals footage into it. Your job is taste — which scenes, which tags, which effects, where the titles go — and the app keeps everything locked to the beat while you change your mind.

It runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel Macs, with real-time VHS and glitch effects on the GPU, and exports a finished video.

Join the beta

Your email is only used to count downloads and to reach you about the beta. No newsletter, no sharing.

Your download

Download Beatknife

Install

  1. Unzip, then drag Beatknife to Applications. Don't run it from Downloads — it can't update itself from there.
  2. Open it once. You'll get this, because the beta isn't signed with an Apple developer certificate yet. Click Done (not Move to Bin).
    macOS dialog: BeatKnife Not Opened, with Done and Move to Bin buttons
  3. Press this button — it opens the right pane of System Settings for you:

    Open Privacy & Security

    Scroll to the Security section. Beatknife is listed as blocked; click Open Anyway and confirm with your password or Touch ID.
    System Settings, Security section: BeatKnife was blocked to protect your Mac, with an Open Anyway button
    The row only appears after you've tried to open the app (step 2), and only for a while — if it's missing, open Beatknife again and come back. This is once per install; updates from inside the app never ask again.

Needs macOS 14 or later. Bookmark your download link — it's yours, and it always serves the latest build.

What to test this week

Make one 30-second video from a song you like, with any footage you have around, and tell us where you got stuck. The Feedback button is in the app's footer and in the Help menu: write a line, attach a screenshot if it helps, send.

What's new

Loading…