Cadence carries its own decoder, so the MKV that stalls everywhere else plays here. Your music lives in the same window, and every control is one key away.
Free · Windows 10 and 11 · 64-bit · 53.9 MB · no administrator rights
FilesMusic
The Long Light.mkv
We leave when the light goes, and not a minute before.
1:12:08 / 2:04:511×
HEVC Main 10 in Matroska
Handed to the decoder untouched
Styled subtitles
ASS, drawn by libass, in the film's own fonts
The engine
Built around the part everything else gets wrong
The engine
Opens the files other players hand back
An MKV is rarely a codec problem, it is a container problem: the picture inside is one your hardware already decodes, the box around it is what nothing will unwrap. Cadence carries FFmpeg, unwraps the container itself and hands the stream straight to the hardware decoder.
A repackage, not a transcode: H.264, HEVC and AV1 are copied through bit for bit, so nothing is re-encoded and quality is identical to the source.
MKVMP4AVIMOVWMVFLVTSM2TSMPEGWEBM
Codecs
The card does the decoding
HEVC, AV1 and H.264 reach the decoder untouched, which is the whole point of unwrapping the container rather than re-encoding what is inside it. Only a codec no browser engine will take, AC-3 and DTS among them, is converted on the way past.
When something does have to be converted, the encoder comes from the graphics card: NVENC, Quick Sync or AMF.
Subtitles
Every track the file already carries
Listed by name and language: plain text, styled ASS drawn by libass, or Blu-ray pictures. Drop an .srt or .vtt on top instead, and nudge its timing while the film runs rather than fixing the file and reloading.
Memory
Picks up where you stopped
Position, volume and speed are remembered per file. Reopen a lecture and it simply continues, no modal asking permission first, just a quiet way to start over.
Tags
Fix what a file says it is
Title, artist, album, year, sleeve, for one track or a whole record. The correction is written into the file itself, so every other player sees it too, and nothing is re-encoded to do it.
Music
Your music: a library, not a folder of files
A film is a file: you know which one you want and a player should be out of the way between the double-click and the picture. Music is not. What you want is that record, and finding it means looking at what there is.
It reads the folders you point it at
Nothing is scanned uninvited. Choose the folders and it reads the tags once, and every folder inside becomes a playlist, because you already did the sorting.
One field, and each word may match a different thing
Type a half-remembered artist and a year and it finds the record. Sort by whatever you were actually thinking of: title, artist, year, or how recently you added it.
Playlists that came from somewhere else
Import an .m3u written by a phone or another player and it finds the music by name and tag, even when the paths inside it point at a device you no longer have.
Lossless stays lossless. FLAC and Opus are handed to the decoder untouched, and the few formats that cannot be are converted to FLAC rather than to AAC.
AlbumsArtistsSongsPlaylists
Lantern Hours
The Quiet Arcade · Low Tide
Keyboard
Every control is one key away, and none of them leaves the home row for long
SpacePlay / pause
←→10 seconds
JL30 seconds
,.Frame step
⇧,.Speed
0–9Jump to %
NPNext file
FFullscreen
CSubtitles
BBookmark
RLoop file
ZZoom
SSave frame
GAmbient glow
MMute
?Everything else
And the rest
Also included: 19 more, none of which needed a paragraph
Speed from 0.25× to 4×, remembered per file
Frame-accurate stepping
Loop a file, shuffle a queue
Timestamp bookmarks, with notes
Frame previews while scrubbing
Plays the rest of the folder, a season, or an album
Five-band equaliser, seven presets
Brightness, contrast, saturation, nine presets
Ambient glow sampled from the frame
Zoom and pan into the picture
Sleep timer, 15 to 90 minutes
Save the current frame as a PNG
Wheel for volume, trackpad swipe to scrub
Media keys and the OS now-playing panel
Seven accents, three themes, three densities
Every shortcut can be changed, to any key
Settings for all of it, and a search to find one
Opens files straight from the desktop
Never needs a connection
The deal
No catch, and here is what that means
Your files stay on your disk
Cadence reads a file from where it already is. Nothing is uploaded, copied to a service, or sent anywhere at all, and nothing about how you use it is measured or reported.
No account, nothing to sign in to
There is no sign-up, no licence key and no activation step. You download an installer, run it without administrator rights, and it opens.
Updates are signed and quiet
A new version is verified against a key built into the app, downloaded in the background, and applied when you restart. Never mid-film.
Free, on every machine you own
Personal or commercial, any number of devices, no charge. Cadence itself is proprietary; the components it is built on are not, and they keep their own terms.
Open a file and it plays
No account, no administrator rights, and nothing to configure before the first thing you drop on it works.