Cadence

Live inputs, prepared clips and hardware all meet on the same four channels. Cadence holds the tempo, the grid and the structure of the set in one place, so there is a single thing to look at when the room is dark and something needs to change now.

A sample-accurate 24-PPQN MIDI clock, phase-locked to the audio clock rather than driven by a timer, with transport start and stop and tap tempo. Cadence is built to be the one clock in the room, not another device negotiating for sync.

The assist layer can carry a transition on its own — key-aware, paced how you like it, looping the build into the drop. That buys you both hands for the modular, the drum machine or the synth, and you take the mix back whenever you want it.

Each channel takes a live input or its own internal player. Three-band EQ with full kills, one HP/LP filter knob per channel in the DJ idiom, a pre-fader cue bus with selectable master and cue output routing, and master metering. Per-channel delay and a shared reverb send sit on the same strip.

24-PPQN MIDI clock out, sample-accurate and phase-locked to audio, driving eurorack, Elektron boxes and drum machines with transport start and stop. Tap tempo for anything unclocked, and an OSC broadcast of beat, phase and tempo for software on the network.

Quantized bar launch, warp and vari-speed sync to the master tempo, flexible grid with key-lock, eight hot cues and cue preview from the browser. Waveform lanes show phase and sync against the beat grid, so you can see whether two decks land together.

A bar timeline with one lane per channel: full-length clips, MIDI blocks and hand-drawn automation, under its own PLAY. Zoom runs from a whole set on one screen down to a sixteenth note, the piano roll selects and edits notes in bulk, and the rows of the key the app has resolved are lit as you write. Saved and reloaded as a Composition.

Automatic beatgrid and structure detection marks intro, break, drop and outro, with auto-sections snapped to bars, mood descriptors and clip-safe gain. The library stores the analysis, so a track you prepared once stays prepared.

Key-aware transition modes, adjustable pacing, a build-up loop into the drop and FX ramps. When tracks are separated, transitions use the stems themselves — real bass swaps and vocal handovers, not just EQ moves. Hand it the next stretch and it holds the mix; take it back mid-transition and nothing jumps.

MIDI-learn on everything, with A/B bank switching so a small controller still reaches the whole surface. A phone remote joins over the local network by QR code. OSC broadcasts clock phase, beat, BPM and transport alongside master band energy, kick onsets, per-stem levels and a drop-aware intensity signal.

Cadence comes up in the Index look: the design language of this site turned dark, square and ruled rather than boxed, with type set by role instead of by whatever height a control happened to have. Classic, the surface Cadence had before it, is still a setting, and the switch is instant with nothing dropping out of the mix.

One right-click separates a track into drums, bass, other and vocals with a state-of-the-art neural model running locally — around forty seconds for a club track on Apple Silicon. Results live in the library cache, so a track is only ever separated once.

Each stemmed deck grows four mute chips and a solo per part, all quantized to the grid — a queued kill blinks until the bar line and drops exactly on it, or shift-click for an instant stab. Key-lock holds pitch throughout, and every chip is MIDI-learnable.

Transitions become stem-aware when the material allows it: bass swaps trade the actual basslines on the swap bar, the incoming vocal waits until the outgoing one is out of the way, and with both tracks separated it hands over drums first, then bass — the way you would.

Arm a channel and the count-in starts on the next bar line rather than under your finger, because a loop that began where the mouse landed could never come back in phase. The click is forced audible for the count, the recording stops itself at the loop length you chose, and the loop starts immediately in the phase you played it. One shared menu sets loop length and count-in bars for every kind of take.

Record a MIDI device onto a Perform channel, onto a Composer lane, or into the clip open in the note editor. Quantize is a sensitivity rather than a switch: it moves note starts and leaves the durations you played alone, so a take tightens without losing its phrasing. Snap to key moves an off-key note to the nearest one in the key the app has resolved, and does nothing at all when no key resolves.

Record a hardware synth on a live input, or a hosted instrument you are playing, as a looping clip on the channel or as a clip in a composition. The tap sits after the channel has made its sound and before it shapes it, ahead of the EQ, the filter and the sends, so the loop is still yours to tweak afterwards. The take is latency-compensated, with a manual trim for interfaces that misreport, and it is born on the master grid rather than handed to a beat detector.

The master button records the master bus, after the compressor and the limiter, as a 24-bit WAV. It runs independently of the channel takes, so recording the night and recording a loop into channel 3 are not a choice.