Track 0 — Play

Fifteen minutes, no code. This track exists because it's how almost every real preset author started — including, going by the credits on half the catalog, people who now write raw GLSL from scratch. Remixing is not the beginner's version of authoring; it's the front door the whole hobby uses.

flowchart LR
    A[Browse presets] --> B[Find one you love]
    B --> C[Open Editor panel]
    C --> D[Drag live sliders]
    D --> E[See source change in real time]
    E --> F[Hit Remix — credit preserved]
    F --> G[Share #code= URL]
    G --> H[Anyone opens it live, no install]

1 · Find one you love

Open toil.fyi and hit Browse presets. Scroll, or use the search — it's a semantic search, not just a keyword match against titles, so queries like "spinning geometric shapes" or "warm slow color drift" work. Pick anything that grabs you. The catalog credits its authors on every entry — a lot of what you'll see traces back to Ryan Geiss himself, or to the community members who kept the format alive after him (Rovastar, Flexi, and the "cream of the crop" curators, among many others).

2 · Open it in the editor

With a preset playing, open the Editor panel. What you're looking at is not a settings screen bolted on top of the preset — it's the actual .milk source, the same text format covered starting in Track 1. Every visual you're seeing is produced by the code in that panel, and nothing is hidden from you.

3 · Turn the knobs

The editor rail has a dozen live sliders — zoom, warp, rot, decay, the pivot (cx/cy), the axis scales (sx/sy), the push (dx/dy), waveform alpha, and border size. Drag any of them and watch the visual change instantly; double-click one to reset it. Under the hood, each slider rewrites the corresponding line in the source text, so if you switch to reading the code after moving a slider, you'll see exactly what changed. This is deliberately the same interface as directly editing the values yourself; the sliders are just a friendlier way to turn knobs whose meaning Tracks 1–2 explain in depth.

If you want to go further than the sliders reach, the editor's Insert tab is a cookbook of techniques — "Zoom on the bass", "Trigger on a beat, once", "Tunnel", "A clock that ignores frame rate", … Each says how it works and is added to the right part of the preset (per-frame or per-pixel code), a few lines at a time, the same scale as the lessons in this curriculum.

4 · Remix, not overwrite

Open the editor's ⋯ menu and choose Remix. This duplicates the preset into your own draft and automatically preserves the credit lineage — the new preset's authorship line records who you built on, in the same "Author A + Author B" convention the catalog itself uses everywhere (open a few preset titles in Browse and you'll see multi-author chains going back years). Nothing about editing a preset here erases whose work it started as.

5 · Ask the AI to explain what you're looking at

If the code is unfamiliar, the editor's Explain button asks the model to describe the preset's motion, color, and reactivity in a few plain sentences — a fast way to get oriented before Track 1 gives you the underlying mental model. There's also a free-text Refine with AI box for "make it faster" or "cooler colors" — every AI edit lands as an inspectable line diff you approve or discard, never a silent rewrite.

6 · Share it

Export produces a .milk file you can hand to anyone with a copy of Winamp, projectM, Butterchurn, or Stims. But you don't need a file at all: copy the URL out of your browser's address bar. Stims encodes the entire preset source directly into the link (#code=…) — the same mechanism every run link in this curriculum uses. Send that URL to someone and it opens your exact remix, live, with nothing to install. This is also how you'll eventually publish your own original work — see the contributing guide when you're ready.

🎯 Quick reference — Track 0

🔗 Where these techniques appear in the wild

Next: Track 1 — How MilkDrop thinks, the mental model behind every knob you just turned.