This page describes how to install Cardinal on a variety of systems.
If you rather build Cardinal from source, please follow this document instead.

Cardinal releases have official builds for Linux, macOS and Windows.
You can find these under https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/releases.

There are Linux builds for various architectures (armhf, arm64, i686 and x86_64), macOS "universal" (arm64 + intel) and Windows 32 and 64bit builds.
Both macOS and Windows builds have an installer.

You can find builds for pretty much any recent Cardinal commit here.
Just click on any successful build, and scroll to the bottom to find the builds.
(note the canvas-like area in the middle prevents mouse wheel scrolling)

A GitHub account is required in order to download these builds.

The easiest way to install on Linux is to move the plugin bundle to their respective user folder.
For LV2 this is ~/.lv2, for VST2 it is ~/.vst and for VST3 it is ~/.vst3.

Create the format-specific (hidden) folders if they do not exist yet, and move the respective Cardinal bundles in there.
Make sure to move the complete bundles (e.g. CardinalFX.vst) and not their contents.
It is important to leave the bundle folders structure intact.

Cardinal macOS builds are in the usual pkg installer format, so there is nothing to copy or move like in other platforms.
Simply download the pkg file, right-click on it and select "install".
During the install setup you can choose to install any combination of LV2, VST2 and/or VST3.

There is no uninstall step, but you can simply remove the plugins from /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins.

Note: The macOS builds are not signed or notarized.
The notarization is not needed when installing plugins from a pkg anyway. Unlike manual copying, macOS will not place binaries installed from a pkg under "quarantine". As long as you are able to run the installer, the plugins should run.

Cardinal Windows builds come as *.exe installer or *.zip file for individual dlls.
The installer will place the plugins and resources on the correct folder.
The zip/individual dlls require you to copy the files to their appropriate folder manually.

Note: The Windows builds are not signed, so Windows will say they are from an "untrusted developer".

For LV2 this is %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\LV2, for VST2 it is %PROGRAMFILES%\VstPlugins and for VST3 it is %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\VST3.
Where these paths are exactly located depends on the installation, run %COMMONPROGRAMFILES% or %PROGRAMFILES% directly to open them. (Win+R shortcut is your friend here)

Create the format-specific folders if they do not exist yet, and move the respective Cardinal bundles in there.
Make sure to move the complete bundles (e.g. CardinalFX.vst) and not their contents.
It is important to leave the bundle folders structure intact.

Alternatively you can find Cardinal packaged in a few software repositories.
These do always not come from Cardinal developers directly, but are still somewhat supported.
Patches are welcome for fixing system-specific bugs, as long as they do not break compatibility with everything else.

Available in the official repositories as cardinal (which installs JACK standalone, LV2, VST2 and VST3).
If you rather have a specific version only, install cardinal-jack, cardinal-lv2, etc individually.

Available in the Audinux repository on Copr, as cardinal (standalone), lv2-cardinal, vst-cardinal (VST2), vst3-cardinal, and clap-cardinal packages.

Available as FreeBSD port, simply run pkg install cardinal to install it.

Available as cardinal (standalone), cardinal-lv2, cardinal-vst2 and cardinal-vst3 packages.
Individual deb files can be downloaded from kx.studio/Repositories:Plugins as usual.

Available in nixpkgs, simply run nix-env -iA nixos.cardinal to install it.