+
+ > Cardinal 22.07 released
+ On 2022-07-15 by falkTX
+
+ Greetings everyone, we have another release of Cardinal,
+ mostly with bugfixes and a new surprise feature.
+ 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.
+
+ The main changes on this release are related to keyboard input focus and VST3 fixes.
+ For the keyboard input issue (basically in some hosts it was/is impossible to type in anything) I created a
+ meta-issue to track all other issues,
+ with a table for each DAW, OS and plugin varant being tested.
+ This helped me understand the situation better, which is pretty much:
+
+ While I was in the process of testing for Windows, I broke my desktop PC, actual broken hardware.. oops :/
+ So that got cut short, but I still added in a way that supposedly works better.
+ Previously the UI would try to give itself focus shortly after appearing on screen, obviously this didn't work as lots of users still reported not being able to type anything.
+ Now the UI will try to get keyboard input focus on every mouse press, which yes it is a bit ugly but let's see if that works.
+
+ More attention was given to the VST3 version, specially testing in many new DAWs.
+ It is very frustrating with VST3 as pretty much all DAWs initialize the plugin and UI in a different way. For example:
+
+ I was meant to have a relase of + DPF-Plugins + today alongside Cardinal, but due to finding so many VST3 related issues I decided to postpone it. +
+ +
+ One of the big highlights of this release, which may come as a surprise if you are not following the project too closely, is the whole of Cardinal running directly in a Web Browser.
+ Yes it is a thing, and yes it works. You can try it at cardinal.kx.studio.
+ (Requires web-assembly support with SIMD, WebMIDI only works in Chrome-based browsers)
+
+
+
+ This was mostly meant as a research effort from my side to see how feasible it would be to run
+ DPF-based plugins
+ on the browser, using
+ emscripten
+ to compile things into web-assembly.
+ By my own surprise, the initial tests proved quite sucessful so I ended up going all the way in.
+
+ It is still not complete, for example clipboard support is missing, and I noticed a few crashes, so it should still be considered experimental.
+ Most of the crashes comes from Rack code and modules never having supported a 32bit build, which is the web-assembly target.
+ Still, as Cardinal already had some work done for Linux and Windows 32bit support, most things just work as-is in the end.
+
+ It is awesome, and perhaps ridiculous too, that this is even a thing that can exist and work so well.
+ Starting with 22.07, wasm (web-assembly) builds are going to be part of the release binaries, and in the nightly/action builds too.
+
+ Note that I purposefully did not use the new AudioWorklet APIs, as that requires special server setup.
+ Everything is single-threaded but in turn it all works by simply hosting the files as-is.
+ If you want to build it yourself, just setup emscripten and use
make USE_GLES2=true+ +
+ No source code modifications are necessary.
+ Build has only been successfully made within a Linux host.
+
+ The source code plus Linux, macOS and Windows binaries can be downloaded at
+
+ https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/releases/tag/22.07.
+ Cardinal is released as LV2, VST2 and VST3 plugin, plus AudioUnit and JACK standalone for certain systems.
+
> Cardinal 22.06 released
On 2022-06-29 by falkTX
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