Cadenza Stable

Cadenza is a small command-line tool that lets you take sounds out of Halo Wars: Definitive Edition and rebuild them.

If you want to swap voice lines, replace sound effects, or tweak what plays when, Cadenza is what you use.

Cadenza is still being improved.
Have feedback or ideas? Join the Halo Wars Hub Discord
Found a bug? Report it on the Cadenza GitHub issue tracker

Download Cadenza

  1. What You Can Do With Cadenza
  2. Basic Workflow
    1. Extract From a .pck
    2. Edit Sounds and Settings
    3. Rebuild for the Game
  3. Credits

What You Can Do With Cadenza

With Cadenza, you can:

Extract game audio

  • Pull out voice lines, sound effects, and other sounds from Halo Wars: DE. Edit or replace sounds
  • Open them in your usual audio editor (e.g Audacity), then save new versions. Change what plays in-game
  • Adjust which sound plays for a given event (for example: which sound a unit uses for a line). Rebuild game sound files
  • Pack everything back up so the game uses your new sounds instead of the originals.

Think of it as

Unpack game sounds > edit them > repack them for the game.

Halo Wars: DE stores its audio in a few file types. You’ll see these names, but you don’t need to fully understand them:

.pck - big “sound packs” that hold lots of sounds and banks.

.bnk - SoundBanks (they tell the game what sounds to play and when).

.wem - the actual audio files used by the game.

Cadenza handles converting these into files you can actually edit, and then back into game-ready files.

Cadenza is a command-line tool. You run it in a terminal / command prompt, not a graphical window.

Basic Workflow

Extract From a .pck

You point Cadenza at a game .pck file.

Cadenza will

  • Find all the sounds (.wem) and SoundBanks (.bnk) inside it.
  • Sort files by language (ENG, FRA, etc.).
  • Save everything as regular files on disk.

At the same time, it creates a project file:

something.cadenzaproj

This project file remembers

  • Which sounds were in the pack
  • How they were organized
  • What needs to be rebuilt later

You don’t need to track any of that yourself, the project file is the recipe for rebuilding.

Edit Sounds and Settings

After extraction, you can work on two main things

The audio itself

  • Convert/edit the audio as WAVs (coming from .wem).
  • Replace voice lines, sound effects, etc.

The sound setup (events and mappings)

  • Cadenza converts .bnk files into easier text-like files called .bnkinfo.
  • These .bnkinfo files are meant to be:
    • Easier to read
    • Easier to tweak

Using .bnkinfo you can change, for example

  • Which event plays which sound
  • Which media ID points to which audio file

When you’re done editing .bnkinfo, Cadenza can turn them back into proper .bnk files the game understands.

Rebuild for the Game

Once you’ve

  • Edited or replaced audio (WAVs)
  • Adjusted events/mappings (.bnkinfo)

You run Cadenza again, this time on the .cadenzaproj file.

Cadenza will

  • Rebuild any updated SoundBanks (.bnk)
  • Rebuild the .pck package(s)
  • Put all your edited audio back into the right places

The result is a new .pck that the game can use just like the original, but with your custom sounds.

Credits

Cadenza builds on other projects

HashDepot (Sedat Kapanoglu)

  • Used for hashing internals.

Wwiser.NET

  • Used to read and convert SoundBank data into .bnkinfo for easier editing.