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> Cardinal 22.11 released
On 2022-11-27 by falkTX

Hi everyone, we have another Cardinal release, 22.11, with a very welcome change and important bugfixes.
Cardinal is a free and open-source virtual modular synthesizer plugin.
It is based on the popular VCV Rack but with a focus on being a fully self-contained plugin version.

Contributed by Francesco Cameli we now have modules processing order based on cable connections rather than when they were first added to the Rack.
With this, there is now a guarantee that no single sample feedback is introduced between cable connections, unless feedback connections are in place or modules have internal buffering.

As an example, Francesco provided a simple patch that plays a sine wave through a sequence of 54 modules to measure the difference of the starting signal with the end one.
As it can be seen below, with the old implementation there was definitely a delay introduced by the connections.
(since the audio engine steps through the modules in the order in which they were created, ignoring which modules should come first according to the cable connections)

cardinal

With the new implementation the signal flow now correctly shows a null sum between the starting signal and the end one:

cardinal

Other important changes are fixes to VST3 multi-IO, CLAP having a multi-IO variant, and macOS Intel builds working much better.

Main Changelog

  • Add classic subtractive polysynth example/demo patch
  • Automatically reset modules processing order according to cable connections
  • Enable CLAP "main" variant (multi-IO audio now implemented, CV ports still TODO)
  • Fix CLAP audio port types (now set as stereo, fixes loading under Anklang)
  • Fix memory alignment issues for macOS Intel platform
  • Fix out of bounds read on host audio 2 meters
  • Fix VST3 non-main ports not receiving audio
  • Make macOS native standalone behaving like Linux and Windows regarding buffer-size changes
  • Mark LV2 CV ports as optional
  • Only use simde, drop sse2neon (following VCV Rack's approach to ARM binaries)

Module changes

  • Add RebelTech
  • Update Meander
  • Fix crashes when loading patches with Macro Oscillator 2
  • Fix out of bounds read in DrumKit modules

Downloads

The source code plus Linux, macOS and Windows binaries can be downloaded at https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/releases/tag/22.11.
Cardinal is released as LV2, VST2, VST3 and CLAP plugin, plus AudioUnit and JACK standalone for certain systems.