Modular in the DAW: Cardinal origins, tips and tricks

Over the past years we developed Cardinal, an open-source eurorack simulation audio plugin based on VCV Rack. It integrates over 1300 modules, is available under the GPL-3.0-or-later license and comes in various plugin formats (lv2/vst2/vst3/clap/au) and configurations (synth/fx/main).

In this talk we explain the reasons for starting the project and how we think this improves the original Rack for running as an audio plugin. We will also showcase some tips and tricks for integrating with the plugin host and some advanced use cases like running it on embedded hardware.