Granular synthesis plugins usually treat a held note as one continuous stream being chopped into grains. FRCTL Audio’s GRNi, released September 6, treats it differently: hold a note, and the instrument spins up its own independent grain cloud just for that note — meaning a chord isn’t one granulated stream split across pitches, it’s several separate clouds happening at once.
Two layers, blended
GRNi is built on the granular engine from FRCTL Audio’s existing GRN effect plugin, repackaged as a full playable instrument rather than a processor you feed a signal into. You load audio into two independent sample layers, each with its own selection range, level, pan, and tune, and blend between them — a texture built from two very different source recordings is as much the point as any single sample’s grain detail.
On top of the granulation itself, GRNi adds scale-locked pitch jitter, which constrains the randomized pitch variation grains normally introduce to a chosen scale — keeping the chaos of granular processing from working against whatever key the rest of a track is in. Playback supports up to 16-voice polyphony across mono, legato, and poly modes, with full MPE support for per-note pitch bend, pressure, and slide on compatible controllers.
What’s around the engine
GRNi ships with 52 factory presets across 7 categories, a 10-slot reorderable effects rack (reverb, delay, distortion, chorus, phaser, flanger, bitcrusher, tremolo, widener, and filter), and a modulation suite of 3 LFOs, 3 envelopes, 4 macros, and a step sequencer. A buffer-library system lets you save and reload sample selections as .grnbuf files independent of a full preset.
Getting it
GRNi is available now as VST3, AU, CLAP, and a standalone app for Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and Linux, at a launch price of $34.99 (regular $44.99) through September 19 — a one-time purchase with lifetime updates, a 14-day free trial, and a 14-day money-back guarantee.