Liminal Rack is a fork of VCV Rack, with changes intended to significantly improve the UI and to make Rack easy to use on an 8" touch screen that can be embedded as a module in a Eurorack.
The name Liminal refers to that nebulous space right on a boundary. In this case the boundary is the dividing line between a Eurorack module as a musical instrument and a general purpose computer. You see, computers are part of a different wavelength. They simpily don't make for a good musical instrument, at least for a good number musicians. The physical interactions via a mouse and keyboard are good for word processing or programming, but they lack the human element of tweaking knobs. And there simply isn't much soul there.
Yet most Eurorack modules are also problematic with cryptic menuss, impossible to read fonts, and confusing layouts. Sure, they can be beautiful, like a musical instrument, but still quite a nuisance.
So what if we created something that was right at the border of a synth module and a general purpose computer? We could ideally use the best of both worlds while dropping the problematic parts.
Therefore the idea is to hide a general purpose computer in a Eurorack module, limit it to performing just a single task of creating patches, and have an immediate UI of a touch screen, knobs, and jacks.
While VCV cannot accept free contributions to Rack itself, contributions can be accepted to the Liminal Rack fork.
Rack is the host application for the VCV virtual Eurorack modular synthesizer platform.
- Andrew Belt: Lead Rack developer
- Pyer: Module design, component graphics
- Richie Hindle: Rack developer, bug fixes
- Grayscale: Module design, branding
- Christoph Scholtes: Library reviews and plugin toolchain
- Translators
- German: Stephan Müsch, Norbert Denninger
- Spanish: Kevin U. Cano Guerra, Coriander V. Pines
- French: Pyer
- Italian: Alessandro Paglia
- Chinese (Simplified): NoiseTone
- Japanese: Leo Kuroshita
- Rack plugin developers: Authorship shown on each plugin's VCV Library page
- Rack users like you: Bug reports and feature requests
- GLFW
- GLEW
- NanoVG
- NanoSVG
- oui-blendish
- osdialog (written by Andrew Belt for VCV Rack)
- ghc::filesystem
- Jansson
- libcurl
- OpenSSL
- Zstandard (for Rack's
.tar.zstdpatch format) - libarchive (for Rack's
.tar.zstdpatch format) - PFFFT
- libspeexdsp (for Rack's fixed-ratio resampler)
- libsamplerate (for Rack's variable-ratio resampler)
- RtMidi
- RtAudio
- Fuzzy Search Database (written by Nils Jonas Norberg for VCV Rack's module browser)
- TinyExpr (for math evaluation in parameter context menu)
VCV is unable to accept outside code contributions, but if you wish to contribute to the VCV Rack software, you can:
- Request a feature or report a bug to VCV Support.
- Learn about Rack and answer questions in the VCV communities.
- Develop your own Rack plugin, or help maintain an existing plugin.
- Apply for a job at VCV.