The free version of the Murmur granular synth plugin is a finished granular instrument that happens to be a subset of a larger one, and plenty of people will never need the rest. Nothing counts down or expires, it doesn't go quiet after ten minutes and the output is never degraded. This page lists what's in each half, straight from the manual's own table.
Flip that toggle a few times. Same patch, same window: what changes is which controls are lit. A paid control is never hidden and never removed, it sits exactly where it'll be once you have a licence, dimmed, and it still answers a hover with a tooltip saying what it does. The drawer tabs stay clickable for the same reason, opening to a legible panel under a veil rather than a locked door. Nothing dim is broken.
The free version
The whole grain engine, is the short answer. Loading any sample by drag and drop or file dialog. POS, SCAN, DENSITY, SIZE, SHAPE and PITCH. JITTER, SPREAD, MAGNET and SLICES. All three grain clocks, HZ, SYNC and KEY, including the sync division. CLASSIC and SLICE play modes, editing slice boundaries on the waveform, the GRID divisions and CLEAR/DETECT. The ENV 1 amp envelope with its slope curves. TUNE, SCALE, VOICES, GLIDE, OUT and the meter. DICE, the cloud colour, and loading any preset, including all nine starter templates.
Everything in the granular explainer runs on the free version too: position, grain size, density and jitter are all on the free side of the line.
Paid features
| Paid feature | What it's for |
|---|---|
| MORPH and the second sample layer | Grains taken from two sounds at once, with a MATCH pill that transposes the second onto the first one's key. One source becoming another across a cue. |
| COHERE | Locks grain timing, position and length to the sample's own pitch, folding a cloud into a solid tone you can play chords with, level-matched. |
| WALK and its step sequencer | The read point steps through slices in time, with per-step offset, level, pitch and seeded probability. |
| ENV 2 and ENV 3 | Two more envelopes with the same handles and curves, pointed at anything through the routing matrix. |
| REPEAT | Grains locked to the exact grid gap at your actual tempo. A beat repeat that survives a tempo change. |
| G-FILTER and G-COMP | Per-grain filter and compressor, on the MOTION card. Every grain can take its own colour. |
| The FX rack | All seven modules, its bypass, and its modulation destinations. |
| Everything that modulates | LFO 1 and 2 including drawn shapes and grain sync, RANDOM, GRAIN RND, the four macros, the source badges, the mod rings and the ROUTING matrix. |
| Saving your own presets | The free version loads any preset, including all nine templates. Writing your own back out is paid. |
The dividing line
Read that list again and a pattern falls out of it. The free version is a complete instrument you play with your hands. The licence is mostly about things that move on their own or stack up: modulation, a second layer, a sequencer, an effects rack, per-grain processing, and the ability to keep what you built.
If you're dropping a sample in, finding a sound and printing it, the free version does that and will keep doing it. If you're building patches you want to come back to, or you want the sound to evolve over eight bars without you holding the dial, that's the paid half and there's no way around it. Saving presets is the one that usually decides it, because it's the difference between a tool you visit and a tool you live in.
It is a one-off $34.99 at the moment, down from $59, on as many machines as you own. No subscription, and updates are included.
If you haven't heard what it does yet, the walkthrough video goes through every control in 13 minutes, with a transcript you can jump around in.