Cadence

A floating, click-through desktop overlay for Spotify and YTmusic — synced karaoke lyrics, an audio-reactive visualizer, album-adaptive theming, a 3D tilt with holographic frames, and a pile of toggleable effects. Now with listen along: share a link and your friends see your lyrics live. Mac + Windows.

   

Cyberpunk — neon billboard with thrusters

Retro — CRT terminal with typewriter lyrics

Ethereal — aurora glass, album-adaptive fonts and colors

Hologram projector — the overlay beams out of a lens at the bottom of the screen

Download

No terminal, no Python, no editor. Grab the installer for your machine:

All versions live on the Releases page.

First launch, because the app isn't signed with a paid developer certificate:

• Mac: the first open says Apple can't verify it. Click Done, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and press Open Anyway (once). If you'd rather use Terminal: xattr -cr /Applications/Cadence.app.
• Windows: SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Click More info → Run anyway (once).

Cadence lives in your menu bar (Mac) / system tray (Windows) — that's where Show / Hide / Settings / Quit are.

Features

• No setup, no Premium — reads the Spotify app on your Mac or PC directly; no developer app or API keys needed. YouTube Music works too, straight from the browser tab
• Synced lyrics from LRCLIB (karaoke-style line highlighting), with Genius as an automatic fallback
• Listen along — start a session, share the code or cadence:// link, and friends follow your lyrics live in their own overlay; Cadence can also play the same song on their speakers, in sync. See who's listening by name, and let them request songs
• Karaoke & games — full-screen karaoke, duets, guess the song, finish the line, beat tap, type the line; solo or with your session
• Shortcuts and auto-hide — global hotkeys to show/hide the overlay, and fade-out after N minutes of silence
• Three lyric styles — Cyberpunk, Ethereal, Retro (terminal + typewriter) — plus an Auto mode that picks a style and one of 30 fonts per track based on the album art
• Album-adaptive theming: colors extracted from the cover tint the lyrics, visualizer, and UI
• 3D parallax tilt with per-style hover frames: neon billboard (with thrusters), CRT terminal, aurora glass
• Hologram projector mode — a lens at the bottom of the screen projects the overlay; click it to power the hologram down/up
• Playback controls on hover, plus ring scrubbing: drag the progress arc around the album art to seek
• Layouts: full, focus (3-line), mini ticker bar, and Notch — just the current line, pinned to the top-centre of the screen under the camera notch, nothing else
• Extras: lyric translation, chorus fireworks, portal transitions between songs, star field, vinyl spin, night shift, daily listening recap, ambient screensaver mode when idle
• Mac and Windows, one codebase, no Python or extra installs

Setup: there isn't any

Cadence reads what's playing straight from the Spotify desktop app on your computer — no developer app, no API keys, and no Premium. Install it, open Spotify, play something.

• Mac: the first time, macOS asks whether Cadence may control Spotify — click Allow. (Changed your mind later? System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation.)
• Windows: nothing to approve. Cadence listens to the system media session Spotify already reports to — the same thing the volume flyout shows. Album art comes from a free iTunes/Deezer lookup, so it can occasionally differ from Spotify's.

Free accounts get everything: lyrics, visuals, and the play/pause/skip/seek controls in the overlay.

YouTube Music

Cadence works with YouTube Music too — pick YouTube Music under gear → Music source (or leave it on Auto, which follows whichever of Spotify / YouTube Music is playing).

• Mac: Cadence reads the YouTube Music tab in your browser — Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, Vivaldi or Safari. The browser has to allow it once: in Chrome-style browsers, View → Developer → Allow JavaScript from Apple Events; in Safari, Develop → Allow JavaScript from Apple Events (turn on the Develop menu in Settings → Advanced). The first time Cadence spots a YouTube Music tab it can't read, a card in the overlay walks you through it step by step and closes itself once it connects. You get lyrics, art, exact timing and the play/pause/skip/seek controls.
• Windows: nothing to set up — the browser (or the YouTube Music desktop app) already reports to the system media session Cadence listens to.

Listen-along guests can follow a YouTube Music host's lyrics, but playing along and the room vote need a Spotify host, since requests are Spotify links.

Optional: Spotify Web API keys

You can also connect through Spotify's Web API with your own keys (gear → 🔑). It adds two things: following playback on your other devices (phone, speakers), and — on Windows — playing along in a friend's listen-along session. Since February 2026 Spotify requires a Premium account to create a developer app (and caps each app at 5 users), so this is strictly opt-in.

1. Go to developer.spotify.com/dashboard and log in with your Spotify account
2. Click Create app — name and description can be anything (e.g. "Cadence")
3. Under Redirect URIs, add exactly:

   http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback
   

4. Save, then open the app's Settings to find your Client ID and Client Secret
5. In Cadence, gear → 🔑, paste both and press Connect. Your browser opens once for Spotify's approval.

The Spotify section in settings picks the source: Auto (the Web API while it's connected, otherwise the Spotify app), Spotify app, or Web API.

Listen along

Share your music with a friend who also has Cadence:

Host: gear → Listen along → Start a session. Cadence generates a code like K7PM-3QXZ and copies an invite (cadence://join/K7PM-3QXZ) to your clipboard. Paste it to a friend. The panel shows how many people are listening; End stops the session.

Friend: click the link (it opens Cadence) or paste the code into gear → Listen along → Join. Their overlay switches to your track and lyrics, in sync with where you are in the song — even if they haven't connected Spotify. With Play on my Spotify too on (default), Cadence also starts the same song on their Spotify at the same position, follows your skips, pauses and seeks, and pauses when they leave. That part needs the Spotify app open on their side; on Mac any account works, on Windows it needs Web API keys (see above).

Names: the host's panel lists who's listening by name. Cadence uses your Spotify display name (Web API) or your account name on this computer; set anything you like in gear → Listen along → Your name.

Handoff: each listener in the host's panel has a 🎧→ button — press it and that friend becomes the host while you keep listening. If the host quits Cadence with people still listening, the session hands itself to the first listener instead of ending.

The room picks the next song (host toggle in the hosting panel): in the last 30 seconds of each song, the pending requests go to a 20-second vote on everyone's overlay — up to 4 options, one pick each — and the winner plays next, automatically. A single request just plays. Ties go to the earliest request; losing requests stay in the list for the next vote.

Song requests: guests paste a Spotify song link (Spotify → Share → Copy Song Link) or press Request what I'm playing. The host sees the request with album art and who asked, and can ▶ play it now, ＋ queue it (Web API only), or ✕ pass — guests get told which happened.

How it works: your overlay publishes tiny "state" messages (track, position, playing) to a private, randomly named topic on ntfy.sh — only when something changes, never your audio or account. Guests subscribe to that topic. Anyone with the code can follow, so share it like a party invite. Self-hosting? Point Cadence at your own ntfy server by adding { "relay": "https://ntfy.example.com" } to settings.json in the app's data folder (Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/spotify-overlay/, Windows: %APPDATA%\spotify-overlay\) or setting CADENCE_RELAY.

Accounts & friends

Gear → Account → Continue with Google. Your Google name and picture come along; change either in the panel, upload your own picture, and pick a unique @handle.

Friends: add people by @handle. They get a request they can accept or decline. Your friends list shows who's online, what they're listening to, and — when a friend is hosting a listen-along session — a Join button that drops you straight in. Your account name is what everyone sees in sessions and games.

Accounts are optional — Cadence works fully without one; signing in just carries your name, picture and friends across devices.

Sign-up

Cadence is free to try; after about 5 minutes of use it asks you to sign in (Google) and keeps asking until you do. Nothing else changes — same lyrics, same features — but your name, picture and friends come with you.

Updates

Cadence checks GitHub for a new version 15 seconds after launch and every 6 hours. On Windows it downloads quietly and installs the next time you open Cadence (or press Restart to update). On Mac it tells you in settings and the menu-bar icon and gives you a one-click download of the right DMG.

Karaoke & games

Gear → 🎤 Open Karaoke & games. A setlist of room games that run on the synced lyric timing Cadence already has — no microphone, no extra accounts. Everyone in your listen-along session gets a colour, and that's how people show up in every game. The host starts the friends games; everyone's overlay follows.

Press Esc to leave a game or close the panel.

Usage

• Drag the gear to move the overlay; click it for settings
• Shortcuts (global, configurable in settings): Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + H shows or hides the overlay, Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + L opens settings from anywhere
• Resize: the Size slider in settings zooms everything; the ⤢ grip just below the settings gear stretches the overlay's shape — drag right for wider, up for taller, each on its own (double-click it to reset). Small / Medium / Large put the normal proportions back, and you can keep up to three sizes of your own with the + slots under them
• Auto-hide when paused: pick 1 / 5 / 15 minutes and the overlay fades out after that long without music, fading back in when something plays; hover it to peek
• The window is click-through everywhere except its controls. If something underneath still isn't getting your clicks, turn on Click-through lock (settings, or the tray menu): the overlay then never takes the mouse unless a panel is open
• On Windows the overlay re-asserts itself above borderless/windowed-fullscreen apps (games, video). Exclusive-fullscreen games can't be overlaid by any window — switch the game to borderless
• Hover the album art for playback controls; with Progress arc enabled, drag the ring around the art to scrub through the song
• Play music and go idle for a minute — Cadence becomes a full-screen ambient lyric display until you touch the mouse or keyboard
• Menu bar / tray icon: show, hide, open settings, copy the invite link while hosting, quit

License

MIT