Cardinal is a virtual Eurorack modular synthesizer platform, available as JACK standalone and LV2, VST2 and VST3 audio plugin for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows.

This is a DPF-based plugin wrapper around VCV Rack, using its code directly instead of forking the project. The target is to have a proper, self-contained, fully free and open-source plugin version of Rack. See the why section below for the reasons Cardinal exists, also perhaps the project overview document for an overview on how the project source code is structured.

Cardinal contains Rack, some 3rd-party modules and a few internal utilities all in a single binary. All "Core" modules from Rack have been replaced by Cardinal equivalents, simplified to better work for an audio plugin.

Cardinal does not load external modules and does not connect to the official Rack library/store. All VCV branding has been removed (to the best of our knowledge) in order to avoid any trademark issues.