What's new in Onset Engine

Onset Engine ships often, and the release notes on the official site are written for everyone. This page is the PMV-maker version: what actually landed, and what it lets us do that we couldn't do before.

Start with v1.0.12 if you only read one. The beat tracker has been swapped for a real joint beat + downbeat model, and the old downbeat grid it replaces was measuring 0–2% correct on electronic music. If you cut to EDM, phonk, or anything else with a machine behind it, your edits are about to sync properly for the first time.

v1.0.12 — A real beat + downbeat engine — electronic and EDM finally sync

Latest

The beat tracker has been replaced, and it isn't close

Onset now uses Beat This! — a joint beat and downbeat model, bundled with the app and running offline. It replaces the librosa beat tracker and, more importantly, the old assumption that every fourth beat was a downbeat.

What it means for us: If you cut to electronic, EDM or phonk, this is the release. Measured across a genre spread, the old downbeat grid was landing 0–2% correct on electronic music — effectively random — and it sometimes locked onto double the real tempo, which is why the odd track came back cutting twice as fast as it should. Beats and bars are both detected properly now. On rock and pop you'll notice a tightening; on electronic it's a different edit.

Buildup escalates on bars, not on a stopwatch

The Buildup narrative arc steps its energy tiers up on real downbeats — bar boundaries — instead of at fixed percentages through the song.

What it means for us: The build used to arrive whenever the timer said so, which on anything with a clear structure meant it landed mid-phrase and felt very slightly wrong without being obvious why. The step-ups now land on the bar, so the escalation arrives with the music. Worth re-rendering an old Buildup project just to compare.

The librosa tracker is still there as a fallback if the model ever can't load, so nothing breaks. And it's still entirely offline — Beat This! ships inside the app, it isn't a call out to somebody's API.

v1.0.11 — Discreet Mode covers everything, and Re-Roll respects your settings

Discreet Mode blurs the preview and the timeline too

Switching it on blurred the library thumbnails but left the large player preview and the timeline clip thumbnails perfectly sharp. All three now blur together the moment you toggle it.

What it means for us: The entire point of Discreet Mode is one keypress and nothing on screen is identifiable. Two of the three biggest things on screen weren't covered, which made it worse than useless — you'd think you were safe. A loaded DJ session on the timeline survives the toggle now as well.

Re-Roll respects Narrative and Pacing

Re-rolling the unlocked clips silently ignored your Narrative arc and Pacing settings, so the new selection could come back with different energy and different cut timing than a fresh Generate.

What it means for us: If a Re-Roll ever felt flatter or oddly paced compared to the Generate it came from, that's why — you were getting a default-shaped selection. It now matches Generate exactly, so Re-Roll is a fine-tuning tool again rather than a gamble.

The library stops getting stuck on "Loading…"

On some startups the clip library sat on "Loading…" until you hit refresh manually. The background scan now hands its results back reliably, and fails open instead of hanging if anything does go wrong.

What it means for us: Small, but it was the first thing you saw on launch. The version badge in the header also shows the exact build now (V1.0.11 rather than a generic V1.0), which makes it possible to tell what you're actually running.

v1.0.10 — Triptych stops trailing into black, Title Card works at 60fps

Triptych ends when your footage does

If your clips were shorter than the song, the triptych kept the full music length and played black after the last clip. It now ends with the footage, fading out picture and music together.

What it means for us: Triptych is the vertical three-panel output a lot of us use for phone-shaped posts, and it was handing back files with dead air on the end that you had to trim by hand every time. A related bug that scheduled the end-fade about a third of the way in is fixed too.

Title Card works again on 60fps exports

The intro card was always generated at 30fps regardless of your render frame rate, so on a 60fps export the final stitch silently dropped it.

What it means for us: If you set a project title and got no title card, that was it. It failed silently, which is the worst kind — no error, nothing to debug, just a missing intro. An empty project name no longer produces a blank card either, and if card generation fails you now get told why.

v1.0.9 — Four features were quietly using the wrong footage or the wrong audio

Triptych panels no longer freeze

When the three clips in a group had different lengths, one panel kept playing while the other two sat frozen on their last frame. Every panel now runs the full length of its group.

What it means for us: This affected far more edits than it looked like it did. A panel plays for roughly three times the slot its clip was picked for, and the renderer was reading the short extracted clip file rather than the source video it came from — so it ran out of footage almost every time. If your triptychs have looked like stills sitting next to video, that was the bug, not your clips. Genuinely short sources now cut away to other footage instead of freezing or looping.

Thumbnails show the moment that was actually chosen

The project thumbnail is meant to be the best frame of the edit, but it was being pulled from a few seconds into the source video instead.

What it means for us: Which is exactly why so many thumbnails came back as an intro, a studio logo, or black. If your thumbnails have been consistently disappointing, this is the whole explanation.

Source-audio ducking was ducking against the wrong audio

With Mix source audio enabled, the audio was lifted from the wrong position in the source file — for a clip twenty minutes into a scene, roughly the opening seconds.

What it means for us: Because the opening seconds are usually silence, the music mostly never ducked at all. Turn it back on and expect it to be a lot more active than you remember. Speed ramps are fixed in the same release — a ramp's slow-motion tail could previously come from an unrelated part of the source, giving you a visible content jump partway through a clip.

Worth knowing if you write drivers: moods, scene_types and min_rating are preferences, not filters. They weight a clip's score rather than removing it from the pool, so a clip matching none of them can still get picked when it's the best available fit — which is what stops an edit developing gaps. Only exclude_tags removes clips outright. The docs used to describe them as filters and were wrong. Onset now also warns you on load if a driver asks for a mood or scene type that doesn't exist — a hyphenated slow-motion instead of slow_motion silently did nothing before, while looking configured.

v1.0.8 — About & Updates, and the changelog inside the app

About & Updates, and an offline in-app changelog

The ℹ button in the header shows the version you're running, a Check for Updates button, and the full changelog — bundled with the app, so it reads fine offline.

What it means for us: Mostly this means you can tell whether a bug you're hitting has already been fixed without going and finding a website. The controls added in 1.0.6 and 1.0.7 — beat export, Stash import, Discreet Mode, Find More, subject filtering — all got hover tooltips in the same release.

On the update check: Onset does not check automatically. No background polling, no startup check, no timer. It contacts the network only when you press the button yourself, and it reads a small file listing the current version — it sends nothing about you or your library. Everything else in the release, changelog viewer included, works entirely offline. Worth stating plainly given who we are.

v1.0.7 — Import your Stash performers, and cut to a funscript instead of the music

Your Stash performers, imported

Onset can now read a local Stash library and pull in the performers and tags you've already curated, matching them to your footage by file path.

What it means for us: If you keep a Stash library, your Onset library arrives pre-tagged. No re-tagging, no starting from scratch — and because each performer comes in with an AI fingerprint attached, "Find More" immediately starts surfacing clips of that performer from footage you never tagged in Stash.

Cut to a funscript, not the song

You can hand Onset an external intensity curve — a .funscript, or a plain time/intensity CSV — and it drives the edit instead of the music's own energy.

What it means for us: This is the one a lot of us have wanted. Got a script you love? Build the edit around it: the cuts still land on the beat, but the pacing and clip intensity follow the script's action. You can also blend it with the music instead of replacing it. Combined with the beat export that shipped in 1.0.6, Onset now speaks funscript in both directions.

Better clips out of long scenes

Clips now end when the shot's content actually changes, instead of at arbitrary intervals.

What it means for us: If you feed it full-length scenes — which most of us do — you get noticeably more usable clips, and fewer that awkwardly span a change in position or camera. On static single-angle footage nothing much changes; the improvement shows up exactly where it was needed.

Re-ingesting no longer scrambles your library

Ingesting the same video twice used to produce different clips every time.

What it means for us: Which quietly orphaned every rating and tag you'd put on clips that no longer existed. If you've ever re-ingested and wondered where your stars went — that was why. Fixed.

Because of the clip-boundary changes, re-ingesting old footage will produce different (better) clips. Your existing library is untouched unless you choose to re-ingest.

v1.0.6 — Performer tagging, beat-grid export, and Discreet Mode

Teach it a performer once

Pick about five clips of someone, name them, and Onset finds every other clip of them across your whole library. There's a new Subjects tab for managing these, with a review queue for borderline matches.

What it means for us: This is the feature that matches how we actually organize footage. Tag your favourites once, then use @TheirName in a driver to build an edit around them. It gets sharper every time you approve a match — and it works on poses and framing too, not just people.

Beat grid export (funscript, Audacity, CSV)

One click exports any track's detected beats as a .funscript metronome, an Audacity label track, or a CSV.

What it means for us: For anyone who scripts or builds cock hero rounds: stop tapping beats by hand. It's free in the demo, ungated — take the grid even if you never render a video in Onset.

Discreet Mode

One click blurs every thumbnail, renames the window, and closes previews. Ctrl+Shift+H hides the app instantly. Optional PIN on startup.

What it means for us: Exactly what it sounds like, and overdue. Onset was already 100% local — nothing ever uploaded — but that didn't help if someone walked past your screen.

Get the latest version

Every feature above is in the current build. The free demo includes all presets, drivers, and the beat export — watermarked at 720p.

Try Onset Engine or try the free demo first - no credit card needed

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