Music & PDF Viewer - Study Deck

Study Deck puts your lecture slides and your music beside the reviewer, in panels that survive every card change.

Anything placed inside a card template is destroyed and rebuilt on each card — which is why a PDF or a music player embedded in a note type resets constantly. Study Deck docks both as real panels on Anki's main window instead, so your scroll position, your page, and your music keep running while you review, change decks, or leave the reviewer entirely.

■ Slide Viewer

• Drag and drop a PDF straight onto the panel, or press Ctrl+Shift+O.
• PowerPoint and Word files are converted automatically if LibreOffice is installed; otherwise export to PDF first.
• Multiple lectures open at once, switchable from a dropdown, each remembering the page you were last on.
• Page stepper, jump-to-page, zoom, and fit-to-width.
• Built on Qt's native PDF engine — no bundled viewer, no flicker, and page jumps are instant.

■ Follow Current Card
The feature this add-on exists for. If your notes embed slide images named with a page suffix — for example Ch38-p012.png — Study Deck reads the lecture name and page number straight out of the card, matches it against your open PDFs, and jumps the slide panel to the exact slide that card was written from.

Miss a question and the source slide is already on screen. Matching is fuzzy, so MicroE4-Ch38-p012.png still resolves to Ch38 - lecture highlights.pdf. It can be toggled off at any time.

Note: this only applies to notes whose images carry a page number in the filename. Everything else in the add-on works regardless.

■ Music Player

• A compact transport bar — artwork, title, play/pause, previous/next, seek, volume, shuffle and loop.
• The video pane collapses away, leaving just the bar; expand it again with one click.
• 16 curated playlists built into the menu across seven categories: study & lofi, calm piano and strings, sung vocals, rap, acoustic and folk, and electronic.
• Every playlist was verified — checked that it permits embedding, loaded and played, and audited against its real track list rather than its title.
• Or paste your own YouTube video or playlist link at any time.
• Your playlist, volume and position are remembered between sessions. Playback is cued rather than auto-started, so Anki never begins blaring music on launch.

■ Shortcuts

• Ctrl+Shift+S — show/hide the slide viewer
• Ctrl+Shift+M — show/hide the music player
• Ctrl+Shift+O — open a lecture file
• Ctrl+Shift+H — hide both panels

■ Notes

• Both panels can be docked, floated, resized or hidden, and their layout is remembered — slides to the left, right or bottom, the music bar to any edge.
• Fully independent — it reads note content only, adds no note types, and modifies nothing in your collection.
• Requires an Anki build shipping Qt 6 with the PDF module. Developed and tested on Anki 26.09 (Qt 6.11). Without that module the music player still works and the slide panel says so plainly.
• The bundled playlists are copyright-free / royalty-free. Some YouTube videos disable embedding; in a playlist those are skipped automatically.