Selling Quad Cortex presets is one of the most manual jobs in music gear.
Someone buys a 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 the whole thing again.
Neural DSP built Cortex Cloud so players could share presets and captures with mates, and it’s fine at that. It was never built as 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 the thing that fills that gap since July last year, and it’s live now at presetbridge.com.
Preset Bridge sits between your store and Cortex Cloud. Your store posts an order webhook. Preset Bridge verifies the signature, records the order, works out which preset or capture the customer bought, signs in to Cortex Cloud, sends the friend request, shares the file once it’s accepted, and writes the outcome to a delivery log. It posts an outbound webhook when it’s done, so your own system can send the confirmation email or close the order.
The friend request is the awkward bit. A pending request isn’t a failed order, it’s just a customer who hasn’t opened the app yet. 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 watching 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 that’s the rule used whenever a matching order line comes through. Set it once per product and it stays set.
There are three ways in. Shopify order webhooks, verified against your Shopify signing secret. WooCommerce via a plugin I wrote, Preset Bridge for WooCommerce, which posts each paid order to your integration URL. And a generic endpoint that accepts any JSON POST signed with HMAC-SHA256 over the raw body, which covers your own backend, a small relay function, or any platform that can sign an outbound webhook.
Orders are deduplicated on the way in, so a store that retries a webhook doesn’t deliver the same preset twice and doesn’t bill you twice for it either.
If you’d rather drive it yourself, there’s a REST API behind an API key. Sign in, list your presets, check a profile, follow a user, share a preset, share a capture, check your credit balance. Same engine the store integrations use, just without the store.
Now the part I’m least thrilled about. To share a preset as you, Preset Bridge has to sign in as you. 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 deletable from Settings whenever you want. That’s the best I can do. Without an official API there’s no delegated auth, no OAuth, no scoped token to ask for instead. If that’s a dealbreaker, I completely understand, and you should keep fulfilling by hand.
There’s no subscription. A preset or capture share costs 10 credits. Signing in, profile checks, preset listings, friend requests and unfollows are all free, because charging for a friend request that might sit unaccepted for a week would be a rort. New accounts start with 30 credits, enough for 3 real deliveries, and you don’t need a card to get them. The smallest pack after that is 1,000 credits for $14 AUD, which is 100 deliveries. Failed paid actions get refunded back to the balance.
Under the hood it’s Aurelia 2 with TypeScript and Tailwind v4 for the public site and the admin console, Firebase Cloud Functions and Firestore for the API, the queue and the delivery log, Puppeteer for the Cortex Cloud automation, and Stripe for the credit packs.
Preset Bridge is unofficial and I’m not affiliated with Neural DSP in any way. It works by driving the same web app you’d be clicking through yourself, which means Neural DSP can change something on a Tuesday and I’m patching it that night. I’ve hardened the share flow more than once already.
They could also ship a proper marketplace and an actual API and make the whole thing pointless. Genuinely fine by me. Preset sellers have been asking for that for years and I’d rather use their version than maintain mine. Until then, this exists.
If you sell Quad Cortex presets and you’ve been doing fulfilment by hand, the docs walk through the setup. Make an account, map one product, and put a test order through on the free credits to see whether it lands where it should.