Most creative work on a computer is a relay race between programs. The photograph is retouched in one, the poster is laid out in a second, the film is cut in a third, graded in a fourth, and the sound is finished in a fifth. Every hand-off is an export, a re-import, a file that drifts out of date, and a subscription.
Accord Suite is a Mac app that puts those jobs in one window. It has eight pages, chosen in a bar along the bottom: Media, Photo, Graphics, Video, Colour, Anime, Motion and Audio. Choose one and the tools for that work are there; the work itself stays in one project.
It is free to download from quantumaccordbg.com/accordsuite, for macOS 15 or later on an Apple-silicon Mac, signed and notarised by Apple.
The 30-second launch film.
This post is the map. Each page has a longer guide of its own, linked at the end.
The eight pages, and what each is for
Every page below is described in the app's own words — the summary it shows for itself — and then in plainer terms.
Media Core — "your files, the source monitor and the media pool, for bringing footage in." This is where a project's material arrives: films, photographs, sound, subtitles. You can browse a folder, copy a camera card with every file checked against the card, judge takes with picks, rejects and stars, tag clips with keywords, and find a shot by what is in it. → Importing media and drag and drop
Photo Core — "layers, the Critic and History, for working on a picture." Develop a RAW photograph, adjust light and colour, select the subject or the sky in one step, mask, retouch, paint, and keep a look to use on other photographs. → Editing photographs in Photo Core
Graphics Core — "layers, the canvas, properties and time, for drawing a graphic and making it move." Shapes and paths, type set along a path or flowed through linked boxes, symbols and their variants, gradients and gradient meshes, and one design adapted to other sizes. → Designing in Graphics Core
Video Core — "project, monitors, timeline and effects, for cutting film." A Source and a Program monitor, a timeline with tracks, inserts and overwrites, every kind of trim, transitions, titles, speed changes, multicam, captions and chapters. → Cutting film in Video Core
Colour Core — "the viewer, scopes, colour wheels and curves, for grading a picture or a film." Balance a shot with the wheels, shape it with curves, grade a single colour, build the grade as a node graph, keep versions of it, and use or make .cube looks. → Grading in Colour Core
Anime Core — "layers, the timeline, curves and effect controls, for making things move." Keyframes and a graph editor, frame-by-frame drawing with a timing chart, bones and pins that bend a drawing, particles, tracking, and a node editor for compositing. → 2D and 3D animation
Motion Core — "layers, the scene, its properties and its keys, for 3D." Build a 3D scene with lights and a camera, pose a mannequin (even from a photograph), raise a picture into a relief, and make a 3D object from photographs. → 2D and 3D animation
Audio Core — "the timeline, the mixer and a clip's own gain and fades, for the sound." A mixer with buses, VCA faders, automation and the Audio Units already installed on your Mac; voice isolation and spectral repair; and a full dubbing workflow: cues, a rythmo band, re-recorded lines matched to the scene, and audio description. → Mixing and dubbing in Audio Core
One project, many pages
The point of one app is that the work does not have to leave it.
A project can hold more than one piece. In the Project panel, New Canvas in This Project and New Composition in This Project add a poster or another film to the same file. Click any of them in the Project panel and it opens on the page that shows it. The poster, the thumbnail and the film can live together, and change together.
Work moves between pages by menu, today. With the playhead on a frame, View ▸ Workspace ▸ Send Frame to Photo Core turns that frame into a canvas of its own, exactly as it looks, and opens Photo Core on it — to retouch one frame as a photograph. Going the other way, View ▸ Workspace ▸ Place on the Timeline turns a canvas into a four-second clip at the playhead and opens Video Core; Send to Anime Core does the same for animation. The clip trims like any other, and the canvas itself is left as it was.
To be plain about it: dragging a piece of work from one page straight onto another is not in the app yet. The menu commands above are how it moves for now.
Files come in by dragging. Drag one file or several from Finder onto the window and each goes where its kind belongs: a picture as a layer, a film or a sound at the playhead, subtitles as captions, a .cube file as a look, an SVG as shapes. With nothing open, the first file opens and the rest are placed in it.
Finding your way
Eight pages is a lot of tools, so the app carries its own help.
- Help ▸ How to Use Accord Suite is a guide of more than 250 short sections, each with what it is for, where the control is, and the steps.
- Help ▸ Everything This Program Can Do finds any command by typing what you want to do.
- Help ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts shows the keys, the ones for what is selected first.
- Ketan, at the right end of the page bar (or Control-Command-K), answers "how do I…" from that guide, page in front first. Describe a change — "make it brighter" — and it shows the plan; nothing changes until you apply it.
Choose a page from View ▸ Workspace, or press Option-Command-1 through Option-Command-8 to go straight to one.
Free, and Pro
Every tool on every page is free. Without Pro, films export up to 1080p and pictures up to HD size (a long side of 1920 pixels), and the export says so. SVG, PDF, web pages and sound export free, always.
Accord Suite Pro exports films at 4K and 8K and pictures at their full size. It is bought once, not rented. On the version from this site it is unlocked with a licence code you paste into Settings ▸ Licence, checked on your Mac with nothing sent; it goes on sale in our shop soon.
Privacy, in one paragraph
Accord Suite works offline. There is no account and no sign-in, no analytics and no tracking, and your documents stay on your Mac. It goes online only when you ask it to: to download an optional image model once (for Fill from a Prompt and the depth tools), to check for an update if you turn that on, or — on the version from this site, off by default and only with your permission for each document — to send a selected area to Google Imagen through your own Google Cloud account. The full policy is at quantumaccordbg.com/accordsuite/privacy.
What it does not do yet
A short list, so nobody finds out the hard way:
- No Windows version. Accord Suite is a Mac app; it needs macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon.
- No drag from one page to another — work moves between pages with the menu commands described above.
- Pro is not on sale on this site yet. Everything else is free, now.
The tour
Two and a half minutes, every core at work, filmed in the app:
The guides
- Importing media and drag and drop
- Editing photographs in Photo Core
- Designing in Graphics Core
- Cutting film in Video Core
- Grading in Colour Core
- 2D and 3D animation in Anime Core and Motion Core
- Mixing and dubbing in Audio Core
- Every way to export
Download Accord Suite — free, for the Mac.