Announcing Preset Bridge

Someone buys a Quad Cortex preset from your store. You open Cortex Cloud, search for their username, send a friend request and wait. They accept whenever they next open the app. You come back, find the preset, share it, then go and mark the order as fulfilled. Then the next order lands and you do it all again.

Neural DSP built Cortex Cloud so players could share presets and captures with their friends, and it’s fine at that. It was never meant to be a shop. There’s no marketplace, no checkout, and no public API you can point a store at. If you sell presets, you are the API.

I’ve been building something to fix that since July last year, and it’s live now at presetbridge.com.

Preset Bridge sits between your store and Cortex Cloud. When your store posts an order webhook, it checks the signature, records the order and works out which preset or capture the customer bought. Then it signs in to Cortex Cloud, sends the friend request, shares the file once the request is accepted, and writes what happened to a delivery log. When it’s finished it fires an outbound webhook, so your own system can send the confirmation email or close the order.

The friend request is the awkward bit. It can stay pending for days because the customer hasn’t opened the app, and I didn’t want that counted as a failed order. So the delivery goes into a queue and picks itself back up when they accept, whether that’s four minutes or four days later. Nobody has to sit there refreshing a browser tab.

Product mapping is per integration. You point a SKU, product ID, variant ID or product title at a preset or capture, and any order line that matches gets that file.

Stores can reach it three ways. Shopify sends order webhooks, verified against your Shopify signing secret. WooCommerce stores install Preset Bridge for WooCommerce, a plugin I wrote that posts each paid order to your integration URL. Anything else can use the generic endpoint, which takes any JSON POST signed with HMAC-SHA256 over the raw body. That covers your own backend, a small relay function, or any platform that can sign an outbound webhook.

Orders get deduplicated on the way in. If your store retries a webhook, the customer doesn’t get the same preset twice and you don’t pay for it twice either.

If you’d rather skip the store, there’s a REST API behind an API key. You can sign in, list your presets, check a profile, follow a user, share a preset or capture, and check your credit balance. It’s the same engine the store integrations run on.

To share a preset as you, Preset Bridge has to sign in as you, and I don’t love that. Your Cortex Cloud email and password are encrypted with AES-256, decrypted only by the worker that runs the share, never written to logs, and you can delete them from Settings whenever you like. Without an official API there’s no OAuth or scoped token I could ask you for instead, so this is as good as I can make it. If handing over your password is a dealbreaker, keep fulfilling by hand. I wouldn’t blame you.

There’s no subscription. Sharing a preset or capture costs 10 credits. Signing in, profile checks, preset listings, friend requests and unfollows are free, because charging you for a friend request that might sit unaccepted for a week would feel like a scam. New accounts get 30 credits without a card, which is 3 deliveries to test with. After that the smallest pack is 1,000 credits for $14 AUD, or 100 deliveries. If a paid action fails, the credits go back on your balance.

The public site and admin console are Aurelia 2 with TypeScript and Tailwind v4. The API, queue and delivery log run on Firebase Cloud Functions and Firestore, Puppeteer drives Cortex Cloud, and Stripe handles the credit packs.

Preset Bridge is unofficial and I’m not affiliated with Neural DSP. It works by driving the same web app you’d be clicking through yourself, so Neural DSP can change something on a Tuesday and I’m patching it that night. I’ve already had to harden the share flow more than once.

They could also ship a proper marketplace with an API tomorrow and make the whole thing pointless. I’d be fine with that. Preset sellers have been asking for it for years, and I’d rather use their version than keep maintaining mine.

If you sell Quad Cortex presets and you’re still fulfilling orders by hand, the docs walk through the setup. Map one product and push a test order through on the free credits to see if it lands.