Every version

What changed, and when.

Cadenza updates itself on its own channel: it downloads in the background and installs when you click, never mid-lesson and never mid-stream. This page is the record of what each version brought.

1.4.1 13 September 2026

The PDF stops cramming, the lead sheet gets readable symbols

  • Recorder PDF: paper has its own staff size now. On screen a row is always four bars and a crowded row is answered with zoom; on A4 there is no zoom, and the window’s size printed straight onto the page pushed the noteheads of a busy bar into each other. The print keeps the four-bar row and shrinks the staff until every bar has the room its ink needs; when even a pocket-sized staff will not hold four, the row gives instead.
  • Lead sheet chord symbols are nearly twice as large — the ink of a Real Book symbol, not a footnote — and a symbol you wrote buys its own width in the bar, so two written chords never print on top of each other. A wide symbol at the end of a bar no longer runs over the first symbol of the next.
  • Chord symbols are spelled by the key. A take in F major writes B♭maj13, as its notes already do, instead of A♯maj13; the flats switch decides only where the key does not. The MusicXML export agrees with the page.
  • Fingering digits and accidentals next to notes are a touch larger still.
  • Hands split is a slider. The point where the left hand ends and the right begins is a place on the keyboard, so it is dragged (C2 to C6, with the note named beside it) and the page re-reads under your eyes; Auto is a switch beside it, and dragging turns it off.
1.4.0 6 September 2026

Two hundred small things, and a chart that hears past the singer

  • Transcribe listens differently now. Before reading the chords it separates what sustains from what strikes and what wavers — drums and a vibrato voice leave the harmony, the sustained notes stay — and it decodes with a prior from the key it has found. Measured on a record with the songwriter’s own chart: roots right in 76 % of bars instead of 61, seventh chords 56 instead of 18, bass inversions 72 instead of 57. One record, a benchmark of one; more charts are being typed to decide what stays.
  • Re-analyse with your edits. Lock or approve the chords you are sure of, press ⇧⌘R, and the song is read again around them — your chords stay word for word, the bars that changed are flagged. Drop your own stems (a bass and an other file from Logic, Moises or any splitter) onto the song and the chords are read from them instead of the mix.
  • A human-style pass through the whole app — seventeen personas, each in its own copy, every finding reproduced by a second pair of eyes — found 243 things and 233 are fixed. The ones you would have hit first: saving a layout did nothing (Electron has no prompt dialog; the dock now asks itself), the computer keyboard played notes only from the dock and not from the Keyboard window, clicking a chord in History or Favourites left its notes stuck in the engine so every later chord was misnamed, the Staff panel merged a chord into the one before it even after your hands came off, the degree numeral setting never reached the Keyboard window, a session under a limited licence deleted the locked panels from your saved workspace, and Reset and show welcome wiped your settings — only in Lithuanian.
  • Practice: Show me is reachable in the ear drill, closing the panel stops the drill, changing the language mid-question keeps the question, a hand that never left the previous answer no longer makes the next question unanswerable, levels are remembered, and changing the level is not a miss.
  • Recorder: a new take no longer inherits the tempo, meter, bar count and tapped beats of the one before it; the recording region, loop and hand are gestures, not settings; the Recordings dialog takes the keyboard; MIDI panic messages are honoured; the 8va bracket clears the fingering digits; and you can play it from the computer keyboard.
  • Grips and Regions: the bass note on over-the-bass rungs is drawn as the key to play, the scale around an upper structure is the chord’s scale, black-key markers are visible in OBS mode, a correct answer’s verdict stays readable after the hands lift, reading screens never grade, and the staff no longer jumps between questions.
  • Transcribe: typing a slash bass edits the bass, Accepted is a state a chart can reach, chord symbols no longer print over each other in dense bars or clip in ordinary ones, key changes are shown in the chart and every export, deleting a song asks first, a moved audio file is named, and a typed chord keeps the letter you typed — B♭/D, not A♯/D.
  • Lithuanian everywhere: the strings the app writes itself — empty states, tooltips, dialogs, placeholders, export tables, the quote counter — follow the language now; the ones that stay English are the jazz terms that stay English by design.
  • Keyboard-only use: Tab order, focus rings on every focusable thing, Escape from every modal without silencing the chord under your hands, Space on a focused button presses it.
1.3.1 3 September 2026

Transcribe meets a real record

  • The first real song through Transcribe came out as chaos, and three things were wrong at once. The tempo picker took a piano ballad’s dotted left-hand figure for the beat, a grid that shares no bar line with the music, so every chord fell across it; now the chords themselves veto that — they change on bar lines, and a beat that does not divide the harmonic period is not a beat. Local tempo is read inside one octave, so it no longer wanders between 47 and 142.
  • The bass now decides the root. F sus2 and C sus4 are the same three notes, and B♭ with a sung C on top fit a “sus” template as well as the triad; half the bars came out as sus chords from the wrong root. The bass register breaks those ties, an inversion keeps almost all of its credit, and a sus chord pays when the third is audibly there.
  • A pushed chord is written on the bar. The player anticipates the change by an eighth, and the draft used to put the new chord on the last beat of the old bar — two chords in one cell, every chorus chord one cell early. A change one beat before or after a bar line now sits on the bar line, as a lead sheet writes it.
  • The grid now reaches the edges of the sound: a soft piano intro used to lose its first beat, so the first bar came out as a pickup and every bar number was one off from the sheet. And a sung seventh over a chord no longer makes it a seventh chord.
  • The bar is the bar you tap. The draft counted that ballad in eighth notes, so every verse chord was printed twice and the chart stopped matching any sheet after three lines. Between two tempo octaves that both fit the harmony it now prefers the one with a chord per bar, and it reads the chords on a half-beat grid underneath, so a chorus that changes every two beats shows both chords in the cell.
  • An instrumental interlude on the verse’s chords is an interlude, not the verse (the loudness says so), and a chord with its whole triad sounding over its third is written as the inversion — F/A, not Am.
  • It knows the form. A pop song repeats, and repetition is countable: the chorus is the part that repeats itself back to back in more than one place, the verse is what lies between choruses on the first verse’s chords, a bridge is what does not, and the intro and outro are what lead in and trail off. The chart names them, and the instances of a part vote on each bar — a bar the draft was unsure about in the third chorus takes what the other two choruses agree on, marked so you can see it did.
  • Lines follow the phrases. A chart that broke every four bars from bar one mixed the end of one phrase with the start of the next as soon as a ten-bar verse had gone by; now a line starts where a four-bar chord pattern that recurs in the song begins, and a two-bar tail stays with its phrase.
  • The bass names the chord, a pushed chord on beat four is a chord of its own, and a bar is named by the whole bar, not by the eighth where a sung passing note happened to land — B♭ with a G in the melody is B♭, not Gm/B♭.
  • On that record the chart now reads F · Dm7 · Am · B♭ through the intro and verse, and F Dm | C Am7 | Gm7 | B♭maj7 through the chorus — most bars right or an equivalent name, still a draft to confirm. Confidence figures on real audio stay low until the corpus calibrates them, so the review list is long by design.
  • 6/8 exists. A second record — a 6/8 ballad at 152 eighth notes with two key changes — came out as 243 bars of 3/4, twice the bars of any sheet of it. A triple pulse that fast is now written as six eighths to the bar, with the tempo shown as ♪ =. Nothing in the sound tells a fast waltz from a 6/8 ballad (it is the reader’s convention), so the other reading is one key away: b halves the bar, B doubles it, and every beat stays where it was.
  • The bar grid may slip. Real arrangements have a half bar before a chorus and a held bar before the last one, and a grid that assumes every bar is full puts every chord after such a bar on beat four. The bar lines are now tracked through the song and a bar may close early or late where the music pays for it; on that ballad two half bars were found, both before a chorus, and the chords after them sit on the bar line again. Irregular bars land in the review list.
  • A third record came with its own chart, and the form matched at once; six things did not. The bar grid no longer buys a slip from a fade-out (only chord changes vote for bar lines now); a bass pitch the harmony does not contain is treated as a drum, not a root; a chord a beat is read where the bass walks a new note each beat; E over a G♯ bass is E/G♯, not G♯m7, when the E is plainly there and no G♯ chord can explain it; a chord pushed a beat early and held is written on the bar line; and repeated parts vote on a bar’s shape before its colour, so a plain C in one chorus takes the C · F/A its siblings agree on.
  • Key changes hold still. The key was read in windows of thirty-two beats — five bars of 6/8 — and that song got twenty-three key regions, so the spelling flipped every few bars. The window is now eight bars whatever the meter, a region shorter than four bars goes to its neighbour, and a key with six accidentals is spelled on the side of the keys around it: a chorus in E is C♯m7 · D♯m7 · G♯m7, not D♭m7 · E♭m7 · A♭m7.
1.3.0 2 September 2026

A song file becomes a chord chart

  • New window: Transcribe. Drop a WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC or OGG you own and it returns beats, bars, the pickup, the meter, the key, a chord per bar with alternatives, and sections A/B — as a draft with a question mark on every bar it is not sure about, never as a finished answer. You confirm it from the keyboard: type a chord, pick an alternative with a digit, mark a bar “unknown”, lock it, tap the first downbeat while it plays, halve or double the grid. Then ChordPro, text, MusicXML harmony, PDF, or straight into the Recorder as a lead sheet.
  • Everything happens on your machine with our own signal code — no model download, no server, and no way to paste a link: it opens files, not YouTube. It is honest about its limits: a sustained pad with no attacks gets “no steady pulse” rather than an invented grid, silence gets nothing, and 6/8 is always written as 3/4 with the grouping left to you. Very fast pieces can land at half tempo; H is the fix. It is in the trial for now; pricing comes later.
  • New window: Regions — Bill Evans harmony as drills: the six diatonic regions, cadence cells, chromatic derivation, modulation formulas, and the dense voicings the method is known for, generated across all twelve keys. Its own progress file, its own course and method screens.
  • The microphone is now a keyboard. In the live window, the Recorder and Grips you can play a real piano instead of a MIDI one; what it hears becomes notes. A noise gate keeps room silence silent, and the listener warms up before the first take so the first bar no longer costs fourteen seconds.
  • Since 1.1.4 the Recorder’s accidentals are one engraved size everywhere and stop climbing onto their neighbours; Grips no longer freezes after a “listen” question, the how-many drill finally deals all three answers, and the hint level moved into Settings too.
1.1.4 27 August 2026

It explains itself now

  • There is a help window. Until now Help was a single link to this website, so with no connection — on a plane, mid-lesson — the app could not answer anything. Press ⌘/ for what each window is, every shortcut that actually exists, how the separate windows work with OBS, and what the modules and the licence cover. English and Lithuanian, offline.
  • It is written by the app rather than typed into it: the panel names come from the same registry the menus use, and the shortcuts were read out of the code that implements them. A list offering a key that does nothing is worse than no list, because it sends you to press it again.
  • The first-launch window used to open with fourteen bare nouns and a checkbox beside each — “Voicings”, “Grips”, “Progression” — asking you to configure things you had not seen. Now three starting points say what they are for, and the fourteen sit behind a disclosure with a sentence each.
  • The quote filter had a second question missing. You could already choose what a line is about — practice, theory, time, improv, philosophy, humour, mindset. Now you can also choose whose voice it is: jazz musicians, composers, classical players, soul and blues, Latin and world, songwriters, teachers, or the anonymous sayings on their own.
  • The two combine. “Composers, on humour” is one question, and it narrows 3,209 quotations to 41.
  • The chips used to subtract. Every one started lit, so the first press on Humour gave you everything except humour. Now the first press means only that one, and clearing the last returns you to all of them. A count under the chips moves with every press, so the control answers where your finger is instead of in another window.
1.1.3 26 August 2026

The drills started keeping score honestly

  • Practice used to wait for the right answer and count every question as correct. Four of its five drills had no losing branch at all. Now a wrong answer costs the question, and the mark is text you can read rather than a red flash you can miss.
  • Getting that right took three passes. The last one was spent undoing damage from the first two: spreading a chord slowly, holding the previous answer, using the sustain pedal, and playing a scale with both hands were all being marked wrong. A hand that is still building is not a hand that is wrong.
  • Where two chord names share one sound — C6 and Am7, an augmented triad and its own thirds — the drill now asks for the root at the bottom. Everywhere else inversions stay free.
  • Hold mode is off for new installs. It latches keys so a chord stays lit, which is useful on stage and confusing on your first question.
  • Grips stopped printing the answer in the side panel during the ear drill, the hand diagram now obeys the help level, and 67 hints that showed both languages at once show one.
  • Voicings are built from the chord you played instead of a table of ten fixed qualities, so a flat ninth is no longer voiced with a natural one.
  • Roughly 2,300 new quotations from musicians, composers and teachers — jazz, classical, soul, blues, gospel, Latin and Brazilian.
1.1.2 23 August 2026

Its own update channel

  • Cadenza now checks for updates on its own channel and tells you what it found. Settings has the version, a Check now button, a live status line and a Restart now button that only appears when there is something to install.
  • Updates never install behind your back. They download in the background and wait for a click — never mid-lesson, never mid-stream.
  • A manual check reports its errors; the background one stays quiet. A button that answers nothing is indistinguishable from a broken button.
1.1.1 23 August 2026

Fingering rewritten against the source

  • The fingering engine was rebuilt on the published ergonomic model (Parncutt, Sloboda, Clarke, Raekallio and Desain, 1997) — the real span table and all twelve rules, plus the octave grammar a scale actually follows.
  • Measured against twelve canonical major scales, both hands, two octaves each way: agreement with the standard fingering went from 40.3% to 96.4%. Thumbs landing on black keys in a scale: 64 → 0.
  • One per cent of swing silently disabled the rubato tracker, and nothing said so. The slider now greys out and names what switched it off.
  • Held pedal notes join the chord on the staff instead of starting a new one — a voicing built slowly under the pedal is one chord, not four.
1.1.0 21 August 2026

Wrap, the book, and a design pass

  • Wrap — the scale layer for Grips. Four notes plus the root means only two are left to guess, and the missing ones always fall into the hand’s own gaps. Seven new rungs, 480 new exercises.
  • Camera mode: your webcam pointed at a real keyboard, squared onto the virtual keys so the two line up in OBS. The perspective correction happens in Cadenza, because OBS cannot do it.
  • A full design pass: softer corners on one concentric scale, one rail for every horizontal edge, one focus ring, one disabled state, motion on shared tokens.
  • Continuous inversion arrived as a rung — one shape walked up the keyboard in steps, not three memorised positions.
1.0.1 21 August 2026

Camera mode

  • The first build that puts a real camera and the virtual keyboard in the same OBS frame, in register.
1.0.0 19 August 2026

Commerce, and the free tier

  • Licence keys, the Ed25519 signing chain and the module gates. Basic — Keys, Staff, Chord and Settings — became free forever, and the paid modules run unlocked for the first three days.
  • Signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised, so macOS opens it without a warning.

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