 Hey, I'm Anfa, welcome to this short live stream. I want to introduce a very exciting new modular plugin, which is called Cardinal. Cardinal is built on top of VCV Rack, and it was made by FalkTX, and I'm just gonna play you a piece of music I made with it yesterday. This is my kick drum, modified to create the snare drum, the hi-hat, the bass, playing solo now. We have the main part, we have sub, and we have some extra stuff. And also there's the lead, it's quite simple. I'm applying some extra processing after the fact, yeah. So that's a really quick, simple track, sorry if I know it sounds a little bit whack, like the drums don't sit as well as they should, and everything is kind of, this is the first time I really used Cardinal or any other type of this kind of stuff to make actual sounds. And of course you may ask, wait, there's a lot of post-processing, what does all that do? Okay, if I disable all of the post-processing, so AB plugins and just Cardinal, let's see what the bass sounds like. So Cardinal gives us a fixed set of VCV Rack modules, open source modules, because it's a plugin, it needs to be self-contained. So these are all the modules that we have, and I was told this is nothing compared to what exists out there and can be added in the future. So all in all, this is a pretty big selection of tools, if you ask me, for creating modular patches and various sounds. So if you wanted to use VCV Rack in your DAW as a plugin, just like I was, just like I did, finally you have it. I mean, okay, finally. There is, I believe it's called VCV Rack Pro or something like that. There is an official plugin version of VCV Rack, but it is, well, it costs money. I don't know if it may even be partially proprietary or something. I don't know, didn't look into it. Cardinal is made by FalkTX, who is the guy who have created KX Studio, who is maintaining Jack Audio Server, who has created Karla, Distro, plugin framework, a lot of the things that we use day-to-day as Linux audio people. And we don't even, maybe we're not paying attention that FalkTX is the person that made this all possible. And Cardinal is his new project. I'm going to read you the page, I'm going to read you the release announcement, because if you're watching this on a phone, you probably want to do some other stuff and you don't want to pause and read. And if you want to pause and read, you can. Cardinal 22.02 is now released. It is finally here. The first release of Cardinal has been slowly brewing behind the scenes and now ready for the masses. First, some introduction. We have a nice screenshot. Cardinal is a free and open source virtual modular synthesizer. It's based on the popular VCV Rack, but with a focus on being a fully self-contained plugin version. Sorry, I have some rocket chat notifications. Cardinal was created first and foremost as a way to have Rack as a proper open source audio plugin. A proper audio plugin should be self-contained as much as possible as to not interfere with the DAW or host. Loading external modules clearly goes against this idea, not to mention being open source. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of the wishes of a company for what we can and cannot do, which is not that great. In case you are not aware, VCV Rack's plugin version called Rack Pro, okay, I just remembered that, is a commercial closed source product. Okay, so it is proprietary. It needs to be said that Cardinal project and its authors do not wish anything bad to the original official Rack project. In fact, Cardinal wouldn't exist if not for Rack V2 release, which has many needed things to make a plugin version work. Cardinal and Rack should be able to coexist friendly and peacefully as they clearly have different targets. It is likely most people will prefer to use Rack Pro for its official support than its big module collection, including commercial ones. A feature comparison between Cardinal and Rack Pro can be seen here. I'm not gonna go there, but I'm gonna link this article. Actually, it's already linked in the live stream. So if you wanna go and read that, you can. Also, I've just realized I'm doing the stream, but I'm not looking at streaming. I don't have a control panel open. I don't know what's going on. If people are watching, if this is even streaming, oh yeah, someone is watching. Oh, there's 90 people watching. Okay, right, I just started streaming. I didn't check if it even works. Sorry, the beauty of doing things live. With that out of the way, let's go through a quick overview. Plugin variants. Cardinal provides free plugin variants, main, synth, and FX. They are all equivalent in performance and behavior with only the I.O. and metadata that changes or is different. This is because some hosts are very strict on which plugins are allowed to as instruments versus effects, so separate variants of the same plugin are needed. FX and synth variants both have two audio outputs, while main has eight. All variants have MIDI input and output support. Main provides eight audio inputs and outputs and 10 CV inputs and outputs. Note that due to VST format not supporting CV ports, control voltage for those uninitiated, this variant is not available for VST2, so I guess only LV2 and VST3. Synth provides two audio outputs, but no audio inputs or CV ports. Makes sense. Plugin type is set as instrument. And finally, FX provides two audio inputs and outputs, but no CV ports. Plugin type is set as regular effect. So I am using Cardinal Synth in my test project right here. It's called Cardinal Synth. And you see, because it's marked as an instrument and it doesn't have audio inputs, it is properly listed in Ardor's MIDI track creation. So we can just select it and you have a empty Cardinal patch to work with, which is great. And FX provides two audio inputs and outputs, no CV ports. OK, so basically main gives you maximum flexibility. We can put eight tracks in, eight audio channels in, 10 control voltage channels in, and take out eight audio channels and 10 control voltage channels. Hey, I see people in the chat. Hello. Nice to see you guys. Included modules. At the moment, the following third party modules are provided. That's a long list. Yay. Initially, Cardinal provides its own modules for DW host automation, time position, and internal plugin hosting. Internal plugin hosting is a pretty crazy thing. And I'm going to show you this, show this to you right now. There is a plugin called Ildial. Ildial. A mini plugin host, blah, blah, blah. Any effects? OK, these are like some small, tiny things. I don't know. I'm using this thing. So Ildial. I don't know how to pronounce this Ildial, is a plugin that can load any plugin. It's a module that can load any plugin. The name comes from, I believe, Korean, and it means one to one. So we can find, for example, my favorite reverb. We can also load internal LV2 plugins. For now, only LV2 plugins. And we can load ether. And now we have ether in running inside of Cardinal. So I can use ether to process my control voltages, I guess. Like, the complexities that this allows is crazy. And also, wait, that would be pretty silly. But I am, oh, oh, sorry. Yeah, I need to hold Shift when I'm typing. I can't type R for some reason. OK, because Shift R is probably some shortcut. Yeah, so we can run Cardinal inside Cardinal. I just for the shits and giggles, I'm going to do that now. It works. I mean, yeah, we can. Yep, I did crash. I managed to crash harder. OK, yeah. Well, wait, didn't our sweet little crash overlay work? Oh, I closed it. That's why. Sad. Lost opportunity. OK, never mind. This is just a quick heads up. I'm not going to do a full demo of the plugin. Current status and future plans. With the exception of a few bugs, Cardinals can be considered stable, mostly as we just saw. Though currently, the following should be noted. Keyboard input does not always work in some hosts. Ah, that's hard work. VST free support is incomplete, experimental. Windows 32 bit builds do not work well. Who wants to use Windows 32 builds? I don't know. Are people still running Windows XP? Why is the audio choppy? Susan, you'll see. I don't know, because probably something really messed up. I'm trying to fix it, but I can't so far. So we have to live with it for a while, for time being. A parameter expander module was not ready for time or its release, but will come soon as a feature release. Fundamental is on a similar situation. There are some artwork licenses issue that prevent us from using fundamental exactly as we want. We plan to redo fundamentals panel graphics in a more liberal license, so it can be included in Cardinal. OK, so fundamental is a bunch of modules, I guess. Blah, blah, blah. Installing and using. So if you want to go and download Cardinal, just go to the Cardinal Releases page. And there you will see the first initial release 22.02, which is February of 22. And there is a link to the article if you missed it and you can download all the builds. As you can see, there are ARM builds. So I guess you can run this or on Raspberry Pi. I could test that, because I got a Raspberry Pi for somehow. But I don't know. I have downloaded the Linux X8664. I have extracted it. I can show you how I installed it, by the way. Let me just. Yeah, so I have a folder named Software. And I have created a folder named Cardinal. I downloaded the file. Extracted it. And here, I have used, I have used, I've made symbolic links to put CardinalSynth, CardinalFX. Just I'm going to filter LV2. So I just made symbolic links to all the free LV2 plugins into my userhome.LV2, which is a hidden directory which can hold your users' plugins. And I just made symbolic links for Windows users. These are like shortcuts, but better. They are handled on the file system level instead of the operating system level. So they are much better. Yeah, and then I just started Ardor and it detected them. Now, assuming, yeah, the official release worked. I had some trouble when I tried unofficial release and things just didn't quite like want to go well. Sorry, I'm misclicking things. Anyway, that's Cardinal. It's a very exciting thing because I can finally use a VCV Rack workflow in my music because I didn't want to go into that too deeply before I can actually use it in a DAW because I want my projects to be self-contained in one DW project, Ardor, in my case for now. And having to open a separate project, export audio to be able to use it in a DAW session is very messy. I like to keep my projects as non-destructive and self-contained as possible. I have used VCV Rack before to create some sounds that I used in a track, but I would prefer to be able to use it as a plugin. And now I can. This is really awesome. OK, that is all I wanted to tell you. Thanks for watching. I hope you'll get Cardinal and you'll have great fun with it. And yeah, the next video should be about D-Bass, which is a very awesome DS-ing plugin from Airwindows, by Chris from Airwindows. Nels, he says, non-destructive. Wink, wink. Yeah. Saying having non- and destructive in the same sentence is kind of loaded after the non-developer has nuked his repositories. Anyway, I'll see you around soon.