FRCTL Audio has released GRN 4.0.0, a major new version of its granular effect plugin.
GRN takes the audio on a track and plays it back as a cloud of overlapping grains, with the pitch quantized to a scale, so a loop, a vocal or a field recording turns into a texture that keeps moving. The update is free for existing GRN owners.
GRN 4 ships as a separate plugin named GRN4. It installs next to GRN 3 rather than replacing it: existing projects keep opening GRN 3 untouched, and the serial, trial and user presets carry over.
The grain engine is new. The selection drawn on the waveform is exactly what the grains play. Grains start inside it and stay inside it, and when a grain wants more audio than the selection holds, it loops with a crossfaded splice. Either edge of the selection can be dragged to trim one side, both edges are modulation targets, and a selection shrunk to a sliver becomes a pitched micro-loop. The grain pool is now 64 grains, four times the previous version, and DENSITY reaches 200 grains per second.
Every grain gets its own lowpass filter and drive stage, with coefficients locked at spawn, so resonance rings per grain rather than across the whole output. A CUT jitter control spreads the cutoff up to two octaves from grain to grain. A new GRAIN SHAPE editor draws the per-grain envelope as a curve: tilted one way it plucks, the other way it swells into a hard stop, and pushed up it flattens.
Also new in 4.0.0:
- A RANDOM card with per-grain jitter for pitch, size, level, shape, reverse and filter cutoff, each on its own knob and each a modulation target.
- Independent PRE and POST filters, each with its own HP/LP cutoff, resonance, on/off and slopes of 12, 24, 36 or 48 dB per octave.
- A third LFO and a third envelope, with a MIDI trigger mode for the envelopes and a MIDIENV source that turns the played notes’ amplitude envelope into modulation. Every continuous knob is a target, the modulators and macros included.
- A full-width STEPS strip for tempo-locked grain patterns: 4, 8 or 16 steps, divisions down to 1/128, drag-painting, 1-4x ratchets and a rhythm preset menu.
- Buffer lengths of 1.5, 3 or 6 seconds, the same at any sample rate. SPRAY is renamed DRIFT and loosens spawn timing from a steady clock to bursts and gaps.
- User presets saved while frozen carry the frozen audio with them.
- A redesigned interface: one knob design on every control, a six-card control row, a vertical OUTPUT fader with a live meter, and a one-page Settings panel with a default-state option, a velocity curve, MIDI channel select and a copy-diagnostics button.
- On macOS, a single Audio Unit that also accepts MIDI replaces the separate GRN MIDI unit from 3.2.0.
Pricing & Availability
GRN is $34.99 and the 4.0.0 update is free for existing owners. A 14-day free trial of the full plugin starts from the activation card with an email address; licenses verify offline, with no subscription and no iLok. A free version, GRN Lite, is also available. GRN 4 runs as VST3, AU and CLAP on Windows, macOS and Linux.
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