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Comment by gausswho | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little torn on how I feel towards the Cardinal project. It claims not to be a fork on a technicality. It brings some improvements certainly and VCV dev has felt stagnant the last couple years, but it's also a little uncomfortably (to me) ideologically trying to GPL VCV. At least they are transparent about it. I like their community presence. I wonder if most users of Cardinal are aware how much of what they appreciate is the work upstream. A lot of value is lost to not have access to all of VCV's free-but-not-GPL modules, but the gap is shrinking.

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What do you mean `trying to GPL VCV`? The Rack 2.0 project was always licensed `GPL3.0-or-later` so we are using it exactly as intended.

Cardinal also contains MIT, BSD and CC0 modules. As long as all the code is compatible to GPL3.0-or-later since everything is built into a single static binary.

A lot of work has gone into due diligence in order to vet all the resources that have gone into the project: https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/blob/main/docs/LICENSES....

The value proposition that Cardinal offers by being self-contained is one of stability, backwards-compatibility and being able to easily share patches with other users without having to download or buy anything additional.

See the differences document to better understand how the projects compare: https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/blob/main/docs/DIFFERENC...

I misunderstood the licensing choices. Thanks for correcting.

VCV Pro has the DAW plugin feature as a paid extra. Cardinal seems to be taking the GPL version of VCV and using it to undercut the main income source of the VCV project.

We are using it to create a self-contained opensource plugin. How does this "undercut" VCV?

Their main model is based around having a "limitless" store where users can buy "premium" modules. And having a plugin-version that allows loading these dynamic modules. This is not something that Cardinal allows and goes straight into the philosophy of a "self-contained" audio plugin.

If anything it's an easy (and free) stepping-stone for users to try a plugin version of Rack and then buy "the real deal" when they want the full-on VCV Rack experience.

The two can easily co-exist. They can even load each other as plugins.

That was never the intent.

There are some technical issues with VCV Rack, and the lead developer is ... gently resistant to accepting patches/fixes from anyone else.

Cardinal started as an attempt to do some things better than VCV Rack does. Most people involved think it would probably have been better if those changes had been upstreamed, but that's not VCV Rack's development model.

What technical issues are there with VCV Rack that are addressed by the forks (Cardinal, MiRack, etc.)?

I recently switched to VCV Rack 2 as my main creative tool, and it has been very stable and performant with frequent updates[0]. My experience led me to pay for Pro just to support this work (even though the free feature set is more than enough).

[0] My only beef, I suppose, is that those frequent updates can alter the sound in case of long-running projects; it never happened with the rack itself, but it did happen with some modules. That said, regular copies of the app and the plugins directory is a sufficient workaround for my purposes, it’s less than 50 MB after all.

The core differences are documented here: https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/blob/main/docs/DIFFERENC...

I have read that before.

Things like “Core only” vs. “Everything is internal” make perfect sense to me as a developer, but this doesn’t answer my question. In fact, “everything is internal” is a downside since no one really uses all modules.

It also appears outdated, since Rack 2 supports ARM (that’s how I use it).

It is also clearly disingenuous in quite a few places, such as by:

a) providing an uncritical generous excuse for every downside of its own (e.g., lack of multi-threaded engine), but never for VCV Rack’s (an opportunity to pay for an open-source project’s development so that it can sustain itself as a proper business is a feature that benefits both the project and OSS ecosystem as a whole), or

b) pointlessly comparing to VCV Rack Pro. I, like many, am not using any of the Pro features—just one of the amazing things about the base version of VCV Rack is its completeness, combined with generous licensing. The VCV Rack 2 I use is open-source, and is free (though I paid for Pro to support the project I don’t use any of the Pro features, I literally never needed them yet), and is supported (it receives updates regularly).

Disingenuous how? it's a factual comparison list.

You say it's pointless to compare to VCV Rack Pro where the whole point of the Cardinal project is to create a plugin version.

I think your commentary is disingenuous.

It is not factual as it is clearly biased in ways I described. It is also outdated and factually incorrect in ways I described. Feel free to address those ways specifically.

I wouldn't lump Cardinal and MiRack. The latter is more audaciously wrapping an outdated VCV and selling it on the App Store. I would like to throw my bones at VCV for such a thing. Hopefully they are working on it.

Cardinal takes money via Github sponsorships. It appears that the original VCV Rack developer’s efforts are a money-maker for a few people…

If you think that this project makes any money you are completely clueless.

Wow, and it is somewhere in this very thread that someone hinted that the maintainer of VCV is the one sort of rude.

There is no information publicly disclosed about how much money is generated, but the sponsorship button is there and that is the point.

the plugin implementation and audio I/O backend are not designed in what would be considered "standard" ways among other audio developers.

it works fine, but it can work better.

cardinal also provides some of its own modules to provide better integration with host provided time.

cardinal also, of course, is now compilable to wasm allowing it to run in-browser. the fact that Rack itself can't be used that way is not, however, an issue or flaw, just a choice.

Thanks, interesting. As a musician I suppose it’s not worth switching away from the original until I have an understanding of how Cardinal works “better”.

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