Instruments built to be trusted.

Cadmium Audio is an independent audio software studio. We verify against real hardware before anything ships — no guessed offsets, no invented specs, no "close enough."

Explore Cadmium Sampler How we work

// Products

What we've built.

One instrument so far, built the way we think all of them should be — deep, honest about its limits, and verified rather than assumed.

Flagship · shipping

Cadmium Sampler

A multi-format sampler that reads SFZ, SF2, Akai, Roland, E-mu, GigaStudio, Kurzweil, Ensoniq and more — natively, not through conversion — in a real-time engine written in Rust.

15+formats

25effects

10character modes

0heap allocs / audio thread

Explore Cadmium Sampler

SFZ

SF2

AKAI

EXS

S-50

EIII

GIG

KRZ

EPS

A3K

DLS

// How we work

Verified, not assumed.

A short list of rules we don't break, because we've already paid for breaking them once.

Audio-first, not spec-first

A format isn't "done" because the structure parses. It's done when the decoded audio matches a reference — bit-for-bit where we can get one, by ear where we can't.

Honest gaps over guesses

When something can't be verified, we say so and ship the honest fallback. A confident wrong answer is worse than a documented unknown.

Real-time means real-time

Zero heap allocation on the audio thread, asserted on every build. Clicks and dropouts aren't bugs to fix later — they're not allowed to exist.

Structure isn't proof

Matching durations, matching field counts, a plausible-looking offset — none of that is verification. Only decoded audio compared against a real source counts.

48 [Kr] 4d¹⁰ 5s²
group 12 Cd Cadmium 112.411 u · atomic number 48

// Why cadmium

A soft metal, a set of famous pigments.

Cadmium — element 48, a soft, bluish-white metal — is best known outside chemistry for the pigments named after it: cadmium yellow, cadmium orange and cadmium red, prized by painters since the 19th century for colour that stays vivid and doesn't fade.

That's the brand: three warm, saturated accents that carry real meaning against a dark, quiet field — never decoration, always signal. The periodic-table cell is our seal across every product; only the typography changes.

Cadmium Yellow#FFC400

Cadmium Orange#ED872D

Cadmium Red#E30022