Patchwerk documentation
Everything you need to build, design, and ship your own audio plugins — plus a deeper look at how Patchwerk turns your project into sound.
The guide walks you through building and shipping a plugin. Under the hood covers what Patchwerk does with your project — for when you want to go deeper.
Guide
Getting started
Install Patchwerk, sign in, create your first project, and make your first sound.
Building patches
Add blocks, run cables, tweak parameters, play notes, and let the AI assistant do the heavy lifting.
Blocks and modulation
A tour of the built-in block library, plus LFOs, envelopes, and how to make any knob move.
Designing your plugin UI
Lay out knobs, faders, and displays, bind them to your patch, and preview the real plugin interface live.
Exporting plugins
Run the setup check, pick your formats, build the plugin, and load it in your DAW.
Under the hood
How Patchwerk works
The moving pieces behind a Patchwerk session: the desktop app, the live audio engine, your project folder, the AI assistant, and your account on the website.
Your project folder
Every Patchwerk plugin is a folder of plain files — JSON, Svelte, Cmajor. What each one is, which are safe to edit by hand, and what Patchwerk rewrites for you.
From patch to sound
Every edit to your graph becomes a small DSP program: Patchwerk generates Cmajor source from your nodes and cables, JIT-compiles it in the background, and hot-swaps the audio without a dropout.
Blocks and custom blocks
A block is a Cmajor processor plus a JSON manifest. Drop a folder into your project's blocks/ directory and it appears in the palette — knobs, modulation, and live reload included.
Inside your plugin UI
Your plugin interface is a real Svelte app inside your project. The Design Canvas is a visual editor over that source code — and you can edit the same files by hand or let the AI do it.
The patchwerk object
Every method and property on the patchwerk object your plugin UI imports — parameters, live telemetry streams, MIDI output, and the bundled controls built on top of them.
The AI assistant
The assistant doesn't just chat about your plugin — it builds the graph, tunes parameters, writes your UI source, scaffolds DSP blocks, and checks its own work. Here's what it can touch and how to steer it.
What export actually does
Export compiles your plugin for real: what gets snapshotted, why it takes longer than editing, how signing works, and where the finished bundles go.
Troubleshooting
Symptom, cause, fix: no sound, compile errors, dead knobs, frozen modulation, blank previews, failed exports, and plugins that hide from your DAW.