Cortex editor

The Cortex editor is a full modular environment in the browser: rack, patcher and a polyphonic simulation engine in one page. It is the front end of the Cortex system — patches made here upload to the Teensy over USB, and a contract test pins the editor to the firmware it was built against.

Racks are assembled from module panels — both MusicBrain's own modules and faithful recreations of classic hardware, drawn to the millimetre. Modules can be grouped into voice groups, bundling identical modules into one polyphonic stack.

Patching works like it does on hardware: drag from an out-jack to an in-jack. Cables are colour-coded by signal type (CV, gate, trigger, audio, MIDI), and knobs, sliders and switches on the panels are live — they show and change the state of the current patch.

The built-in engine plays the patch in the browser: MIDI comes from an on-screen keyboard, a test sequence or Web MIDI, and the voice chain follows the patch connections. Polyphony scales from mono to sixteen voices, including an eight-voice DX7 with the original factory ROM banks.

The editor and the Teensy firmware share one contract: the firmware dumps its module catalogue and the editor's test suite verifies against it, so a panel in the browser always matches a DSP module on the hardware. Editor versions therefore follow the firmware series — 0.5.48 pairs with firmware 0.5.48, which carries the Mutable Instruments ports (Rings, Plaits, Clouds, Tides, Marbles, Warps, Stages, Peaks), the DX7, drum machines and the sequencer family. Release tags follow editor/cortex/vX.Y.Z.