MURMUR

GRANULAR INSTRUMENT  ·  USER MANUAL  ·  SOUNDS LIKE YOU

Murmur is a granular instrument you play from the keyboard. Drop any audio file on it and the sample is broken into grains you can scatter, stretch, tune, chop and lock to the hits it finds in the file. The cloud you see is the sound: every particle is a real grain leaving the engine.

It runs as a VST3 and an Audio Unit in your DAW, and as a standalone app. This manual documents version 2.9.0.

1   Install

macOS

Quit your DAW, then run the .pkg and follow it through. You can pick which pieces to install:

• /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/Murmur.vst3
• /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/Murmur.component (Audio Unit, for Logic and GarageBand)
• /Applications/Murmur.app (the standalone)

macOS 11 or later, Intel or Apple Silicon. Release builds are signed and notarized, so macOS opens them with no security prompts.

Windows

Murmur needs Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit. The installer checks before it copies anything and stops with a message on an older version of Windows, because the plug-in would not load there.

Quit your DAW first. Windows cannot replace a plug-in file while a DAW has it open. Then either run Murmur-x.y.z-Windows-Setup.exe, which puts the VST3 in C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\Murmur.vst3 and the standalone in C:\Program Files\Sounds Like You\Murmur\, or take the plain zip and copy the whole Murmur.vst3 folder (it is a bundle, not a single file) into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\ yourself.

Nothing else needs installing. Murmur carries the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime inside the plug-in, so there is no separate redistributable to download first, and the zip copy works on a machine that has never had one.

VST3 and standalone only. There is no Audio Unit on Windows.

Preset folders

The ones you save:
macOS: ~/Library/Audio/Presets/Sounds Like You/Murmur/
Windows: %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Sounds Like You\Murmur\Presets\

The presets the installer puts down, which Murmur reads and never writes to:
macOS: /Library/Application Support/Sounds Like You/Murmur/Presets/
Windows: C:\ProgramData\Sounds Like You\Murmur\Presets\

Uninstall

macOS: delete whichever of the three paths above you installed. Windows: use Settings, Apps, Murmur, Uninstall, or delete the files you copied by hand. Your saved presets are left alone either way. To remove those too, delete the preset folder listed above.

Updates

Murmur checks for a newer version at most once a day, in the background, and shows a small amber Update chip with the new version number in the header when one is live. Click it to download. The new installer replaces the old version in place and your presets are untouched. The check is a single request that downloads one small file: the current version number, and the list of refunded licences described in section 13. The request carries no identifier, no licence data, no audio and nothing about your session, though like any web request it shows our server an IP address. If you are offline the check fails without a message and you never see it.

2   Free and full

Murmur is free to keep, and a licence key adds the rest of it. There is no trial, no countdown and no expiry date. The free version does not stop working, does not go quiet after a while, and does not degrade. It is a finished instrument that happens to be a subset of a larger one.

Read this table before you go hunting for a dimmed control. Nothing below is broken when it reads dim; it is telling you which half of the instrument you are in.

Free, always	Full version adds
Loading any sample, by drag and drop or the file dialog	Morph, and the whole second sample layer
Pos, Scan, Density, Size, Shape, Pitch	Cohere
Jitter, Spread, Magnet, Slices	Walk play mode, and its step sequencer drawer
The Amp envelope, including its slope curves	Env 2 and Env 3
Classic and Slice play modes, editing slice boundaries on the waveform, the Grid divisions, and Clear / Detect	Repeat
The Hz, Sync and Key grain clocks, and the note lengths in Sync	The grain filter and grain compressor, on the Motion card's Filter and Comp tabs
Tune, Scale, Voices, Glide, Out and the meter	Bass mono
The dice, the cloud colour, and loading any preset	The effects rack: all 21 effects, Bypass all, and every effect control as a modulation destination
The nine starter templates	Everything that modulates: LFO 1 and LFO 2 (drawn shapes and grain sync included), Random, Grain Rnd, the four macros, the source chips in the footer, the modulation rings, and the Routing drawer
	Saving your own presets, and the 23 installed presets that bring their own audio

A paid control is never hidden and never removed. It sits exactly where it will be once you have a key, dimmed, and it still answers a hover with a tooltip that says what it does. The three drawer buttons stay clickable in the free version for the same reason: the drawer opens and you can read it, with a dim veil over the top. Close always works.

This manual documents the whole instrument. Where a section covers something the full version adds, it says so at the top.

3   First sound

1. Put Murmur on an instrument track. It appears under Sounds Like You.
2. Drag an audio file onto the big dark display at the top left. WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 and Ogg all load. Anything works: a drum loop, a vocal, a synth chord, a field recording. Stereo and multichannel files are folded to mono on the way in; in the rare case a file's channels cancel each other out when mixed (some very wide synth loops do), Murmur imports the strongest channel alone and says so over the display.
3. Play a note. You are hearing grains cut from that file.
4. Drag left and right across the display to move where the grains come from.

That is the whole instrument. Everything else changes how those grains are cut and where they land.

Two gestures worth learning straight away. Scroll over the display to zoom into the sample; a small Fit pill appears opposite the file name showing the current magnification, and clicking it puts the whole file back in view. And double-click any knob to put it back to its default, anywhere in the plug-in, including the dials inside the effects rack.

Clicking a file name opens a short menu with Load sample... for a file dialog, and Load morph layer... in the full version for the second sound in section 5.

4   The face

Everything lives on one screen. The display is on the left with the Motion and Envelope cards beside it, a strip of utilities runs under them, three plates of dials sit across the middle, and the footer carries the modulation sources, the output and three drawer buttons.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

1. 1Wordmark. Click it to open soundslikeyoumusic.com. Hover it to read the version number.
2. 2Preset name. This field is the browser: click it to open. The chevrons either side step through the list in the order the browser shows it, without opening anything (section 12), and an amber dot after the name means you have changed something since it loaded.
3. 3Dice. Rolls a new starting point inside musical bounds. Right-click for Undo the last roll and Load a random preset.
4. 4Cloud colour. A swatch grid plus a custom two-hue ramp. Looks only, nothing to do with the sound. The gear to its right is the settings menu, covered at the end of this section.
5. 5Play mode. Classic, Slice or Walk, at the top left of the display. See sections 6 and 7.
6. 6The display. Every particle is one real grain, and the waveform runs along the base. Drop audio here, drag sideways to scrub, scroll to zoom, and click the small x beside the file name to unload it. The readouts at the top right show the grain rate and grain length in force.
7. 7The Motion card. Four tabs on its title line: LFO 1, LFO 2, Filter and Comp. The first two are the LFOs; the last two are the per-grain processors in section 9.
8. 8Rate. The open LFO's speed, with an Hz | Sync switch under it.
9. 9Shapes. Five waveforms and a sixth icon, Draw, for a shape of your own, under the LFO's live trace.
10. 10Macros. Swarm, Drift, Shimmer and Melt: four knobs you turn by hand that drive other knobs. They stay put on all four tabs.
11. 11Random and Slew. Rate and smoothing for the stepped random source, beside the macros.
12. 12The Envelope card. The volume shape of each note, as a curve you drag, with Amp | Env 2 | Env 3 tabs on its title line and the four values printed underneath.
13. 13Scan, Shape, Slices. Three compact dials opening the utility strip. Scan and Slices carry an AB | A | B selector for the second sound.
14. 14Grid. Where the slice boundaries come from: the detected hits, an even spread over the file, or a note value. See section 6.
15. 15Tune. A toggle and the detected root, which you can override by clicking it.
16. 16Scale and Key. Scale lock and its root note.
17. 17Voices. Polyphony, Mono up to 16. At Mono a Glide dial appears beside it.
18. 18Grain clock. Hz, Sync or Key, sitting over the Density dial because it is that dial's clock.
19. 19Morph mode. How the two sounds are woven, over the Morph dial.
20. 20Spray. Jitter, Magnet and Spread: how loosely the grains land.
21. 21Grain. Size, Density, Pos and Morph: the grain stream itself. The buttons under Density hold Repeat in Sync and the morph layer's density ratio.
22. 22Pitch. Pitch and Cohere.
23. 23Source chips. LFO 1, LFO 2, Random, the four macros and Grain Rnd, each with its own live trace or level. Drag one onto a knob to modulate it, or click it to see what it moves.
24. 24Bass mono. Sums everything below its frequency to the centre, from 60 to 300 Hz, or off at the bottom. Full version.
25. 25Out and meter. Master level after the effects rack, and the stereo meter beside it.
26. 26Drawer buttons. Walk, FX and Routing. Opening one closes the others, and Esc closes the open one. Walk is drawn dim outside Walk mode.

A dial that cannot do anything in the current setting rests: it dims, and pressing it shows the reason for a few seconds. Section 14 lists the common ones.

The settings gear

The gear at the right of the header is the one menu in Murmur that is about the plug-in rather than about the sound, which is why it sits out of the way:

• Knob rings: Always, the default, draws every dial's value arc all the time; When touched shows a dial's arc only while you are moving it.
• Grain cloud: how the display draws the grains. Constellation is the default, and Nebula and Classic are the other two; the choice changes the picture and never the sound.
• Tooltips: a tick you can clear. It is remembered per user, on this machine, and it is not saved into presets or your session, so turning them off once turns them off everywhere and a preset someone sends you cannot turn them back on.
• Watch tutorials opens the Murmur tutorial videos in your browser, and Open manual opens this manual.
• Open presets folder reveals the folder from section 1 in Finder or Explorer. It creates the folder first if you have never saved anything.
• Save preset... and Load INIT are shortcuts to the two things in the preset browser you most often want without browsing. Saving is part of the full version, so in the free version that item is greyed and says so.
• Check for updates now runs the once-a-day check from section 1 immediately, and tells you it is checking either way.
• The version number at the bottom, as a label.

5   The controls

Every dial here is a host parameter, so you can automate it or map it to a controller. Drag a dial up and down to move it, or use the scroll wheel. Double-click returns it to its default. Hover anything for a one line reminder.

The three plates

Control	Range	What it does
Jitter	0 to 1	Randomises each grain's start around the read point, which loosens a rigid loop into a scatter. The amber band on the waveform shows the range.
Magnet	0 to 1	Pulls grain starts toward the slice boundaries on the waveform. At 0 the scatter is free, at full every grain lands exactly on a boundary. While Magnet is up, Classic mode draws the boundaries it is pulling toward.
Spread	0 to 1	Stereo width. Pans grains left and right for a wide, diffuse cloud.
Size	10 to 500 ms	Length of each grain. Short is clicky and textural, long is smooth and pad-like. Default 50 ms.
Density	0.5 to 200 /s	Grains per second at the Hz clock. In Sync the same dial picks a note length instead, and in Key it rests. Its caption says which: Density, the note length, or Key.
Pos	0 to 1	Where in the sample grains are taken from. Dragging across the display moves this. It rests in Slice and Walk mode, where the slice is the position.
Morph	0 to 1	How much of each grain comes from the second sound instead of the first. It rests until you load a second layer. Full version.
Pitch	±24 st	Transposes every grain without changing grain length. Hold Shift while dragging to move in whole octaves, keeping any offset you have set.
Cohere	0 to 1	Locks grain timing, position and length to the sample's own pitch, level-matched so turning it changes the character and leaves the volume alone. Turned up, a pitched sample plays like a solid synth tone instead of a texture. The lock scales with how confident the pitch analysis is (it reads the audio itself, never the filename), and with no usable pitch the dial dims and its tooltip says why. Full version.

The utility strip

Control	Range	What it does
Scan	±2	Sets the read point moving on its own. 1.00 crawls forward at the sample's own speed, 2.00 is double, negative runs backwards, and it wraps at the ends. The centre is a detent, and parked there Pos stays put. Right-click Scan to make the sweep start again from Pos on every note, or only on a note played with no other key held, so a legato line keeps moving.
Shape	0 to 1	The window each grain is heard through. Fully down is a smooth rounded fade, the centre is a flat top that only tapers the very edges, and fully up is a soft bell. See the chop recipe in section 11.
Slices	0 to 1	Sensitivity of the hit detection that places slice boundaries. Low keeps only the strongest hits, high keeps everything. It rests while the boundaries are authored rather than detected, because then the count is no longer its decision, though it still guides Re-slice. See section 6.
Grid	Transient, Fit or a note value	Where the boundaries come from. Transient is the detector, Fit spreads them evenly over the whole file, and a note value lays them on the beat. See section 6.
Tune	on / off	Remaps the keyboard to the sample's real key, so middle C plays the note you expect. The readout beside it names the root Murmur found and where it came from: file from the filename, a percentage from pitch analysis, or manual if you set it. Click the readout to override it, pick an octave, or put it back to Auto. A dimmed readout means the sample is not strongly pitched and Tune has little to grab.
Scale, Key	9 types	Snaps every grain's pitch to a scale: chromatic, major, minor, both pentatonics, dorian, mixolydian or lydian, from the root in Key. Off leaves pitch untouched. Pitch bend still glides freely either way.
Voices	Mono to 16	Polyphony limit. A note past the cap takes the oldest voice already released, or the oldest held one if every key is down. At Mono in Classic, overlapping notes carry the sound over and change pitch rather than starting again, and letting go returns to a key still held. Fewer voices means less CPU.
Glide	0 to 2000 ms	Appears only at Mono. How long the pitch takes to slide from the last note to the new one. All the way down is an instant jump.

The grain clock

The three buttons above Density decide what sets the grain rate.

Mode	What it does
Hz	The Density dial sets grains per second, free of the host.
Sync	Grains land on a note length of the host tempo, and the Density dial picks it: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/8T, 1/16, 1/16T or 1/32, starting at 1/16. The dial shows the note length as its value. With no host clock it runs at 120 BPM. This is where Repeat lives.
Key	The pitch of the note you play sets the grain rate, which pushes it up into audio range and turns the stream itself into the tone. The grain train is now the oscillator, so you can play chromatically and stay in tune whatever key the sample itself is in. Density rests. Key wants short grains: the grain rate is the note frequency, so long grains overlap many to a cycle and smear the pitch into a wash. Short Size and a sharp Shape give a hard, buzzy oscillator; long and soft gives a formant pad.

Repeat

Full version. Repeat sits under Density and appears only in Sync.

Repeat locks each grain to the exact gap between two grid ticks, so the grains butt up against each other instead of overlapping. You hear the sample as itself, chopped on the grid, which is a verbatim beat-repeat. It stays locked to the host tempo, so changing tempo re-locks rather than drifting.

While Repeat is on, Size and Shape rest. The grid sets the length and the window becomes a flat top with a short fade at each edge, so neither dial has anything left to decide. They dim rather than disappear, and pressing either says why.

The envelopes

The Envelope card is a curve with three handles. Drag the first sideways for attack, the middle one sideways for decay and up and down for sustain, and the last one sideways for release. The four values are printed under the curve as you go. Attack runs to 10 seconds, decay to 2 seconds and release to 20 seconds. The handles cannot cross each other.

Slope curves

The line between the handles bends too. Press anywhere on the attack, decay or release segment, away from a handle, and drag up or down: the segment bows toward the top or the bottom of its travel instead of running straight. Dragging up always bows the line upward, on all three segments. Double-click a bend to straighten it. The sustain shelf is flat by definition and holds no curve.

This is what turns a linear decay into a snap that falls fast and then hangs, or a release that holds and then drops away at the end. The curves are free, like the rest of the Amp envelope.

Env 2 and Env 3

Full version. The Amp envelope is free, curves included. Env 2 and Env 3 are part of the modulation system.

The tabs on the card's title line read Amp | Env 2 | Env 3. Amp is the envelope described above: it is the volume shape of every note, and it is always in circuit. Env 2 and Env 3 are not connected to volume at all. They are two more envelopes with the same four handles, the same ranges and the same slope curves, and they do nothing until you point them at something.

Drag a tab onto a knob to route that envelope there, the same way you drag a source chip (section 8). The Amp tab works too, so the contour already shaping each note's level can also open a filter or sweep a position. You can also pick any of the three as a source in the Routing drawer.

Env 2 and Env 3 are gated by the keyboard rather than by a single voice: every new note retriggers them from the start, and the release only begins when you let go of the last held key. So on a held chord, adding a note restarts the attack for both of them, and lifting one note of three changes nothing. They run from 0 up, which makes them useful for anything you want opened and then closed once per phrase: a filter cutoff that blooms, a Morph amount that arrives late, a pitch that settles.

The card opens on Amp. Which tab you were last on is not stored in a preset.

Morph

Full version.

With one sound already loaded, drag a second file over the display. The display offers two targets while you hold it there: the whole surface reads Replace sound, and a small Add morph layer tab sits in the bottom right corner. Drop on the tab to add the second sound. Once a second sound is loaded, its whole violet lane is the target for replacing it. You can also click the first file's name and choose Load morph layer....

Morph comes alive, and turning it up starts taking grains from the second sound. Leave the Match button at the end of the violet lane lit and Murmur transposes the second sound onto the first one's key, which is usually the difference between a morph and a clash. The menu above the Morph dial decides how each grain chooses between the two:

Mode	What it does
Blend	Mixes both inside every grain, so the dial is a plain crossfade.
Scatter	Gives every grain a coin flip.
Alternate	Hands grains out in strict turn.
Onset	Sends a grain to the second layer when it lands near one of that layer's hits.
Resonator	Uses the second sound to strike a resonant body tuned to the note you are playing: the morph layer is the hammer, the key is the bell. Morph fades from dry layer A into the ringing. It wants long grains; see below.
Follow	Lets the second sound's loudness open and close the first: layer A sounds where layer B is loud and falls away where it is quiet. Morph sets how hard that gate bites; see below.

The first three hand each grain to one layer or the other. The last three make every grain out of both at once, which has consequences beyond the sound, two headings down.

Resonator wants long grains

The resonant body lives inside the grain, and it can only ring for as long as the grain does. At the default Size of 50 ms the body is cut off long before it has finished sounding: it measures 13.6 dB quieter than dry layer A, and what you hear is thin enough to mistake for the mode doing nothing. Turning Morph up does not fix it. Size does.

Size	What Resonator does there
50 ms	13.6 dB below dry. Thin, and easily mistaken for nothing. This is the default, so it is where you will first hear the mode.
150 ms	Level-competitive with dry. Treat this as the floor for the mode.
400 ms	10.8 dB above dry, and still sustaining where dry granular has thinned out. This is the setting the mode exists for.

So reach for Size first and Morph second. Past about 150 ms Resonator stops being a quiet effect and starts being a sustaining instrument that the second sound is playing.

The body is tuned to the note you play, so it follows the keyboard, Tune, the pitch bend wheel and Glide, which is what makes it playable. Its Q is not a control: a physical body has a Q, and Morph already decides how much of the ringing you hear. Expect high notes to ring shorter than low ones, as a smaller body does.

What you load into layer B is the character of the strike. A broadband, transient-rich sound excites the body across its range and reads as a mallet; a tonal one sitting on the note you are playing drives it hard and reads as a bowed or blown tone. Leaving Match lit is what puts a tonal layer B on that note in the first place.

Follow is a gate

Follow never plays the second sound at all. Each grain runs an envelope follower over the layer B it reads, and that envelope opens and closes layer A: silence where B is silent, wide open where B is loud. Load drums into layer B under a pad and the drums chop the pad in their own rhythm. Morph sets how deep the gate bites, and the dial covers a lot of ground: the bottom quarter is a gentle pump, the midpoint is already a heavy 30 dB duck, and from there the mode turns into a true gate, so at full the stretches where layer B is silent are silent. Somewhere around 40–50% is the musical middle; past it you are shaping holes in the sound.

The gate's attack is a fixed 2 ms, so layer B's transients bite as transients. Its release starts at 80 ms and tightens as Morph rises, down to 25 ms at full: low settings breathe between hits, and full snaps shut so the gaps open up. Both are fixed in real time, so a 20 ms grain and a 400 ms grain hear the same gate; short grains simply live less of the release. A quiet layer B means a mostly closed gate, because the gate can only shape the main sound down, never up.

Scan on layer B picks which part of that rhythm does the gating. Scan to a different bar of the loop and the pad is chopped by that bar instead.

Three modes belong to neither layer

In Blend, Resonator and Follow one grain reads both sounds through one window and one gain. It is a single grain made of both, so it belongs to neither layer. Those three behave as one group everywhere the instrument has to ask which layer a grain belongs to, and every per-layer control stands down in all three of them:

• the Size selector's B state, because one grain has one length;
• the density ratio, described at the end of this section, because there is no separate morph-layer grain to fire at a rate of its own;
• Walk's B sequence key and layer B's step row, in section 7;
• every routing row's layer selector, in section 8.

Each one goes flat and inert rather than vanishing, its tooltip names the reason, and your setting is kept. Pick Scatter, Alternate or Onset and all four come back exactly as you left them.

The other split dials are unaffected. B Pitch, B Pos and B Scan work in all six modes, because a grain reading both layers still reads them at two rates, from two places, moving two ways. That is true even in Follow, where layer B is never heard directly: B Pos picks which part of the second sound's rhythm is doing the gating, and B Pitch speeds or slows that rhythm, because pitch is a read rate.

Splitting a dial: AB, A and B

A morph layer is a second sound, and it usually wants its own settings. Five dials, Pitch, Pos, Size, Scan and Slices, carry a small AB | A | B selector that decides which layer the dial is holding:

State	What the dial does
AB	Linked, and the default. The dial drives both layers together, which is exactly what it did before there was a choice, so older presets sit here and sound the same.
A	Split. The dial is the main sound's value and moves nothing else. Layer B keeps whatever it was given and does not follow.
B	Split, with the dial now holding layer B's own value. The main sound does not move, the dial's arc turns violet, and its caption says whose value you are turning: B Pitch, B Pos, B Size, B Scan.

With one sound loaded the selectors are drawn dim and do nothing, and hovering one says Load a second sample to use layer B. In the free version they stay dim.

A and B are one state to the engine: the pair is split, and the selector only decides which half you are looking at. Stepping through AB and out again does not wipe either side's value, so you can compare the two layers by clicking back and forth. Both values are host parameters, and both are saved.

B Pitch is layer B's own pitch, not an interval away from A's. Layer B still tracks the keyboard, the pitch bend wheel and Glide exactly as layer A does: those three belong to the note, so they are shared and only the two dials are independent. Scale lock applies to both for the same reason. Drop the same file into both layers, set B Pitch twelve semitones down, and Morph becomes a fade between a sample and itself an octave lower.

B Size cannot apply in Blend, Resonator or Follow, because a grain in those modes has one window and so one length. The Size selector goes inert on AB there and says why; your B size is kept, and splitting again in one of the other three modes returns it.

B Pitch, B Size and B Scan are dials rather than modulation destinations, so in state B the dial carries no modulation rings and refuses a dropped source. B Pos is the exception: it is a destination in its own right, listed as B Pos in the Routing drawer.

Layer B's read position

The Pos selector is also the answer to "where does the second sound read". At AB layer B mirrors layer A: wherever the read point sits in sound A, proportionally, is where it sits in sound B, and Pos, Scan and dragging the display move both. Split, B has a read position of its own, and a Pin button appears beside the selector:

• Pin off: B trails A. B Pos is a distance, plus or minus the whole file, and moving the main sound moves both while the gap holds.
• Pin on: B holds. B Pos is now an absolute place on B's own file, and Pos, Scan, Magnet, slices and Walk move layer A alone while the violet line stays where it is. This is how the second sound becomes the root note the first one moves around.

The violet line across the display is layer B's playhead. Drag it to move B along its own timeline without touching where A is reading. Grabbing the line while the two are still linked splits the pair and starts the drag in one motion. Switching Pin never jumps the line: the number behind it is rewritten so B stays where it is while its meaning changes from a distance to a place. Going back to AB snaps B onto A and keeps the distance you had set, so splitting again returns B to where you left it.

Pin holds B's base position; Jitter still scatters each grain around it. And in Slice or Walk mode, once layer B has slices of its own, Pin changes nothing: each key already addresses B's own slice at its own absolute place. For the same reason the Pos dial rests on the B side in those modes; see section 6.

The grain cloud follows: B's grains are drawn at B's position, so you can see the two layers reading different parts of two different files.

Slices for layer B

A second sound is cut up by its own transients. The Slices dial's selector works like the others: at AB one sensitivity divides both sounds, and split, layer A's value divides A and layer B's divides B, so one can have six slices and the other five if that is what the material wants. What each layer then does with its slices is in section 6.

Thinning the morph layer: the density ratio

One Density dial feeds both sounds, which is right until you want a sparse second sound punctuating a dense first one. The ratio under Density cycles 1:1, 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4, and decides how often the morph layer takes the grains it is handed.

• 1:1 is the default, and the feature switched off. Both layers fire on every grain Density asks for, so every preset you already have sounds identical.
• 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4 make the morph layer fire on only every second, third or fourth grain that would have been its own.

Layer A is untouched. The grains layer B does not take are dropped, so thinning B never makes A denser and never moves a single layer A grain. The main sound goes on exactly as it was while the second one gets sparser, which lets you set the balance by ear.

The count is of the grains nominated for layer B, not of every grain in the cloud, so the ratio means the same thing in every splitting mode. In Alternate with Morph at halfway, where layer B already has every other grain, 1:2 gives it every fourth grain overall.

The ratio appears once a morph layer is loaded, and it stands down in Blend, Resonator and Follow for the reason given above. It keeps showing the ratio you picked while it is inert. It is a host parameter like the rest, saved with your session and with your presets.

6   Slices and the grid

Murmur analyses every sample you load and marks the hits it finds. Those marks are the slice boundaries, and one set of them does three jobs: they are the slices Slice mode plays, the targets Magnet pulls toward, and the steps Walk walks through.

In Slice and Walk mode the boundaries are always drawn on the waveform. In Classic they are hidden, because nothing in Classic plays them, and three things bring them back: the Slices toggle at the right of each lane, which Murmur remembers for you; Magnet above zero, so you can see what it is pulling toward; and a two-second flash whenever you turn the Slices dial or change Grid.

The Grid menu in the utility strip decides where the boundaries come from. It reads Transient (the hits Murmur heard), Fit, or a note value, and whichever you pick, you can move, add and remove boundaries by hand afterwards.

Detection

At Transient the boundaries are wherever Murmur heard a hit, and the Slices dial sets how fussy that is. Low keeps only the strongest transients, high keeps everything. This is the setting you want on a drum loop with clear hits.

Three things about what the detector hears decide where the boundaries land. A hit at the very beginning of a file is detected: on a loop cut on the downbeat, the first hit is a real slice, and C1 in Slice mode plays it. A file that fades in, or a drone that simply starts, is not treated as a hit at sample 0. How strong a hit counts as is measured from the energy the hit adds, so hits of the same weight rank the same whether they land in silence or on the tail of the one before; that is what makes the Slices dial thin a dense passage gradually. And when a file has more transients than Murmur will hold, the strongest are kept, not the first, so a long recording does not run out of slices partway through.

When Murmur is asked for a set number of boundaries (Re-slice, or a Steps count in the Walk drawer) it also keeps them spread out. It takes the strongest hits first, but a hit has to sit at least half an average slice width away from every boundary already placed before it is accepted, so one loud bar cannot take every slot. If that rule is too strict to fill the count, Murmur relaxes it and tries again; it still splits the widest remaining gaps if it comes up short, and it falls back to an exact even division on material with no hits worth finding, which is why this works on pads and drones. The trade is that on dense material a real transient in a busy passage can be passed over for a weaker one in a quiet stretch.

The grid

Pick a note value in Grid and the boundaries stop being about the audio. Murmur lays them at exact multiples of that length from the start of the file, at your host's tempo. The list runs 1/1 down to 1/64, each with a dotted (1/8.) and a triplet (1/8T) variant. With no host clock (the standalone, or a host that reports no tempo) it uses 120 BPM, as the Sync grain clock does.

This is how you chop a bar into sixteenths whatever the sample does, and it is the way to get even boundaries on material where detection has nothing to hear. The Grid menu applies to the first sound only; layer B's boundaries are reached through its own Clear / Detect button and by editing its lane.

A note value lays boundaries until the file runs out or the Walk drawer's Steps count is used up, whichever comes first. With a Steps count set, the boundaries cover that many divisions from the start and the waveform shades whatever lies past them, so you can see which part of the file the pattern never reaches.

There is a ceiling of 256 boundaries. If the note value you asked for would run out before the end of the sample, Murmur uses the finest value that does cover the whole file and moves the menu to show it, so what the control says is what is in force. At 120 BPM that puts the limit at about 32 seconds for 1/16 and 8 seconds for 1/64; on ordinary loops you will never see it.

Fit

Fit ignores the tempo and divides the whole file evenly. With a Steps count set, it makes that many equal slices from the first sample to the last; with Steps on Auto it makes 16. It is the quickest way to cut a loop that was not recorded to your project's tempo, or a one-shot, into equal pieces.

Editing boundaries by hand

In Slice or Walk mode, double-click the waveform to add a boundary where you clicked, or double-click an existing boundary to take it away. Zoom in first if they are close together, because the grab radius is measured on screen. The limit is 256 boundaries, and Murmur says so over the display when you reach it.

Once the boundaries are authored rather than detected (after a Grid note value, Fit, a Steps count or a Clear) every boundary is draggable. Press within a few pixels of one and drag it along the waveform; it stops before it can pass its neighbours. Slices rests while the boundaries are authored, because the count is no longer its decision, but it still guides Re-slice.

Clear and Detect

At the right of each lane is a small button that names where that lane's boundaries come from, and switches it. Layer A's appears in Slice and Walk mode, the modes where its slices do something; layer B's sits in the violet lane whenever a morph layer is loaded.

• Clear, on a detected set, empties the lane completely and stops consulting detection. From there every double-click puts a boundary exactly where you want one, so you can build a slice map from nothing. It also drops a beat grid laid down by Grid, the same as picking Transient.
• Detect, on an authored set, hands the lane back to the detector at the current Slices sensitivity.

The button is lit in the lane's own colour while the set is yours, because a lane whose slice count no longer answers to the Slices dial should say so.

Counting with Steps

The Steps menu in the Walk drawer takes a number from 1 to 16, or 32, and asks for exactly that many boundaries. Grid decides where they are placed, Steps decides how many there are, and they stop when the count runs out. Setting Steps back to Auto drops the pattern and the authored boundaries together and puts detection back in charge, whatever Grid happens to read. Move Grid to lay a fresh set down.

Two buttons in the Walk drawer, deliberately separate:

• Re-slice puts the boundaries back where detection would have placed them, at the current count and the current Slices sensitivity. Your pattern is untouched.
• Reset puts the pattern back to plain order with every edit cleared. Your boundaries stay where you dragged them.

Slice mode

In Slice mode the keyboard maps onto the boundaries from C1 upward, one slice per semitone, each at its natural pitch. Pos rests because the key you press is now the position, and dragging the display no longer scrubs. Notes below C1, or past the last slice, are silent rather than wrapping around. Play the loop back in a different order, or hold three keys at once.

Two layers, one number

With a morph layer loaded, Slice and Walk do not point layer B at a proportion of where layer A is reading. Each layer reads from its own slices, addressed by the same number. Key 3 plays layer A's third slice and layer B's third slice, wherever those two fall in their two files; in Walk it is the step's slice number that both layers look up. Layer B can have its own Slices sensitivity (section 5), so the two can have different counts, and the number is the only thing they share. A five-hit vocal chop and an eight-hit drum loop stay two instruments you play from one keyboard.

It follows that a key can run off the end of one layer and not the other. A key past a layer's last slice is silent on that layer rather than wrapping around or borrowing the other one's slice. In Blend and Resonator that grain loses its B share and leaves dry layer A where it was; in Follow a layer B with nothing to play is a gate that never opens, so layer A comes through held at the depth floor (quiet at low Morph, silent at full); in Scatter, Alternate and Onset the grains dealt to B are dropped. Layer A keeps playing normally, so the top of the keyboard thins out rather than breaking.

And the Pos dial rests for both layers here: the slice is the anchor, so a dial that moved the read point would drag a layer off the slice it was told to play. Modulation still applies, and adds around the anchor: a route to Position moves layer A around its slice and a route to B Pos moves layer B around its own.

7   Walk and the step sequencer

Full version. In the free version the Walk mode is dim and the mode falls back to Classic.

In Walk mode the read point steps through the slices on its own, in time with the host. You still have to hold a note for anything to sound: Walk moves the read head, it does not play notes. It ignores which key you hold, so any note gives you the same phrase at the sample's own pitch, unless Tune is on.

The Walk button in the footer opens the step sequencer. It covers the plates and the footer and stops under the utility strip, so you can see the boundaries on the waveform while you edit the pattern that points at them. Outside Walk mode the button is drawn dim, and pressing it tells you to pick Walk at the top of the display first.

The drawer at Auto

Out of the box Steps reads Auto, which means there is no pattern: Walk simply walks whatever detection found, in order. The row still shows you what it is doing, dimmed to say it is a readout.

Walk works on up to 16 slices, or 32 if you pick that in Steps. Switching a lane to Walk keeps its 16 strongest slices and Steps reads 16; Detect or a Grid change brings the full set back once you leave Walk. A session or preset saved before 2.7.0 keeps all of its slices until you touch a Walk control, and while it does, a +N tag on the right of the row stands in for the ones off the end.

Clicking any card at Auto takes control: it builds a pattern with that many steps and hands you the editable row. Picking a number from Steps does the same thing deliberately.

Building a pattern

Pick a number in Steps. Murmur lays out that many boundaries on the waveform and that many cards in the row, each pointing at its own slice: step 1 plays slice 1, step 2 plays slice 2, and so on. That is your starting point. Now change it:

• Click a step to hear it. The click plays that slice, holds the walk on that step so it repeats on every pass while you work on it, and makes its row the one you are editing. Click it again to let the pattern run.
• Drag sideways on a step to point it at a different slice. The card does not move; the big number in the middle counts up or down as you drag. That number is the slice, and the small number in the corner is the step, so a reassigned step is one where the two disagree.
• Double-click a step to switch it off. It dims. A step that is off is skipped rather than left as a rest, so an eight step pattern with two off is a six step pattern and the groove changes shape.

Under the row are four lanes, one per tab: Level, Offset, Pitch and Prob. Each lane has a bar under every step. Draw across the lane to set several steps in one stroke, or click one bar to set one step. Double-click a bar to put that step back to its default.

Lane	Range	What it does
Level	0 to 100%	Volume for this step, in 5% steps. Ghost notes.
Offset	0 to 100%	Nudges the start point inside the step's own slice, as a fraction of the distance to the next boundary, in 5% steps. It cannot leave the slice, and it means the same musical amount whether the slices are 60 ms or two seconds apart. Use it to push a step slightly late without moving the boundary itself.
Pitch	±24 st	Transposes this step in whole semitones. Scale lock still applies on top.
Prob	0 to 100%	The chance this step sounds on any given pass, in 5% steps. The dice are seeded, so a bounce renders the same twice and the same bar sounds the same every time round.

Each card also writes its pitch and its chance underneath once you change them, so you can read a pattern at a glance without opening a lane.

Order and rate

Order is Forward, Ping-Pong or Random, and it reorders the steps, not the slices, so it works on the pattern you built. Ping-Pong bounces without repeating the end points. Random is seeded from a fixed number, so it scrambles but it repeats: the same bar plays the same way every time, and a bounce matches what you heard.

Rate is 1/1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 or 1/16, and defaults to 1/8. Walk locks to host tempo and to the transport position, so steps land on the bar. With no host clock it free runs at 120 BPM. It keeps stepping when the transport is stopped, unless Trig is on.

Timing

Swing delays every second step, up to three quarters of the way through its pair at full. Humanise moves each step a little early or late, by up to an eighth of a step, the same way on every pass, so a bounce matches what you heard.

Trig makes each note start the pattern again from step 1, and the steps run at Rate from that note, swing and humanise included. While the transport is stopped and no key is down, the lit step waits on step 1. With Trig off the pattern keeps its own time: on the host's bar while the transport plays, free running when it is stopped.

On step starts a grain exactly on every step, so each slice lands on the beat and Density fills in between. Without it a step only sounds when the next grain comes along, which at a low Density can be most of a step late. It is on for a new sound. Sessions and presets saved before 2.8.0 open with it off and play as they always did.

Layer B's own sequence

Full version, and only with a morph layer loaded.

With a second sound in the violet lane, B sequence decides whether the morph layer follows the pattern or walks one of its own.

• Off, the default, is the way Walk has always worked: one pattern, both sounds. Every preset made before the option existed sits here and plays exactly as it did.
• On, it lights violet and layer B gets its own row of cards under layer A's, marked A and B, in the violet its lane and its grains wear, with its own step count and its own steps.

The violet row edits exactly like the amber one. Clicking a card on either row makes that row the one you are editing, and the drawer says so: Editing A or Editing B. The lanes, Steps, Swing and Humanise all follow the row you are editing, so to give layer B six steps you click one of its cards and pick 6 in Steps. Selecting a step on either row parks both layers, each on the step that position names in its own row, which is how you hear the two against each other while you edit.

Layer B's Swing and Humanise each have a small link button beside them. Linked, the default, B follows A's value and its own dial rests; unlink it to give layer B a swing or a looseness of its own.

One clock, two lengths

Both rows run on the same step clock. There is no second Rate and no second Order: those describe the shape of the walk, and the two rows are the same walk over different material. The drift comes from the lengths. Four steps against six come back round every twelve; five against sixteen take eighty. Give layer B a count that does not divide into layer A's and you have a polyrhythm you did not have to program.

You get one for free before you build anything. Leave layer B's Steps on Auto after turning B sequence on and layer B walks its own detected slices, in order, exactly as layer A does at Auto. Two sounds rarely detect the same number of hits, so they are already out of phase with each other.

Layer B's steps address layer B's own slices, by number. The two sounds can be sliced completely differently (a different count, a different sensitivity, boundaries you dragged yourself) and B's step 3 still means the third slice of the second sound.

Shared between the rows

Reset clears both patterns. Re-slice re-detects the boundaries on the main sound.

Three morph modes cannot split

In Morph's Blend, Resonator and Follow modes every grain reads both sounds through one window and one gain. There is no layer B grain for a layer B step to be about, so B sequence goes dim, the violet row disappears, and the engine runs the single pattern. Your choice is kept: switch to one of the other three modes and the split comes back exactly as you left it. Section 5 covers what those three modes have in common.

The split also needs grains reaching layer B: with Morph at zero every grain is layer A's, and B's row is running but silent. Turn Morph up to hear it.

Both patterns and the B sequence setting are saved in your DAW session and in any preset you save, and B sequence is a host parameter you can automate.

Patterns and boundaries

The pattern and the boundaries are stored separately on purpose. The boundaries travel with the sample; the pattern travels with the parameters. Dragging a boundary does not disturb the pattern, and a step that pointed at slice 3 still points at slice 3, which is now somewhere else. You can also point more steps at fewer slices: the numbers wrap rather than clamp, and shrinking the slice count and putting it back restores exactly what you had.

Both are saved in your DAW session and in any preset you save.

8   Modulation

Full version. All of it: the sources, the rings and the Routing drawer.

The Motion card

The Motion card holds four tabs: LFO 1, LFO 2, Filter and Comp. The first two are the LFOs described below. The last two are the per-grain filter and compressor, which are not modulation sources and have a section of their own (section 9); they live here because their cutoff is the thing you most often want an LFO on.

The four macros and Random stay put on all four tabs, so turning a macro never means going back to a tab first. The tab you are on is remembered with your session, and loading a preset leaves it alone.

The sources

There are fifteen sources. Eight of them live in the footer as chips with a live trace or a level bar: LFO 1, LFO 2, Random, the four macros and Grain Rnd. The rest you reach from the tabs or the Routing drawer.

• LFO 1 and LFO 2 each have a Rate dial from 0.02 Hz to 20 Hz, five shapes (sine, triangle, saw, square, sample and hold) plus Draw, and a live trace. The Hz | Sync switch under Rate picks the clock, and the readout at the trace's top right always says which clock is in force.
  • Hz: the Rate dial sets the speed in hertz.
  • Sync locks it to the host, from 1/1 down to 1/16 with dotted 1/4 and 1/8, and the Rate dial steps through those note lengths.
  • Grain sync advances the LFO per grain instead of per unit of time, one full cycle every 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 grains. The grain clock is the clock, so the LFO speeds up and slows down with Density, and each voice steps through the shape with the grains that voice is playing. The readout says, for example, 8 GR, and neither Hz nor Sync is lit. It is the way to get "every fourth grain is darker" rather than "the cloud gets darker twice a second". Grain sync lives in the clock menu: click the rate readout, or right-click the trace or the Rate dial.
  An LFO's own rate is not a modulation destination in any of the three.
• Random jumps to a new value at its rate, and Slew smooths the jumps from instant steps to a glide.
• Grain Rnd has no controls at all. It deals one fresh random value to every single grain.
• The four macros (Swarm, Drift, Shimmer and Melt) are knobs you turn by hand. Out of the box each one drives three destinations. Double-click a macro's name to rename it, and the new name follows into the chips, the Routing drawer and the menus. Right-click a macro to see and edit everything it drives.
• The envelopes: Amp, Env 2 and Env 3, from the Envelope card in section 5. Drag a tab to use one.
• Velocity and Keytrack come from the note you play. Pressure follows channel or polyphonic aftertouch, and Timbre follows CC74, the MPE slide. All four are per note, so each voice in a chord gets its own value. Pick them in the Routing drawer.

Drawing an LFO shape

The sixth icon in the shape row is Draw. Clicking it turns the trace into an editor for that LFO's own curve, starting from the shape you were on, and two modes appear at the right end of the row:

• Points: drag a point to move it, or drag the line between two points up or down to bend it. The points in the middle move sideways as well as up and down, and stop before they can pass their neighbours; the two at the ends stay pinned to the start and finish of the cycle. Double-click empty space to add a point, and double-click or right-click a point to remove it. Up to 16 points, and never fewer than two.
• Pen: draw the shape freehand. When you let go it becomes points, so you can tidy it with Points afterwards.

The Reset icon beside them goes back to the shape you started drawing from. While you are drawing, the clock menu is on a right-click of the background or a click of the rate readout. Picking one of the five standard shapes leaves the drawn curve and goes back to that waveform; your points are kept, so Draw brings the curve back exactly as you left it.

Making a route

Drag a source onto a knob: a footer chip, or the LFO 1, LFO 2, Amp, Env 2 or Env 3 tab. The route starts at 30% and the source is selected, so its ring shows on the dial. Drag the ring up or down to set the depth; a small label shows the amount while you drag.

Click a chip (or a macro's name, Random's name, or the tab of an LFO or envelope that is already open) to select that source without dragging. Every dial it moves then shows its ring, which is the quickest way to see what a source is doing. Click it again, or press Esc, to clear the selection. With nothing selected the panel stays quiet: a modulated dial shows only a small dot at its top right, in the colour of its first source.

Right-click a dial for the list of routes reaching it. Each row has a depth slider (double-click it for zero), the amount, a direction button and an x to remove the route, and Clear all sits at the bottom.

The direction button decides which way a route moves its dial. Both ways swings the dial either side of where you set it; One way only pushes it in the direction of the depth. Click it to flip. A new route starts on its source's natural direction: both ways for LFO 1, LFO 2, Random, Keytrack and Grain Rnd, which swing either side of zero, and one way for every other source, since those run from zero up. A route saved before 2.9 loads exactly as it played.

Macros are sources, so dropping one macro on another does nothing and Murmur says so.

Each row of the Routing drawer is a source, a destination, a depth bar from -100% to +100% (double-click for zero) with the amount beside it, a layer selector covered below, and an x to clear the row. An empty slot reads Add route; click it to pick a source and then a destination. The drawer is the only place to reach a destination that has no knob on the panel, and the place to pick Velocity, Keytrack, Pressure and Timbre.

Onsets, on the drawer's title line, sets how grain starts are timed when the clock is Hz: Periodic spaces them evenly, Poisson randomises the gaps for a cloudier feel.

There are sixty-four route slots and the drawer shows sixteen at a time, as two columns of eight. The four numbered buttons on the title line move between the pages: page one is slots 1 to 16, page two is 17 to 32, and so on. The slot numbers down the left of each column are absolute, so the row labelled 20 is the twentieth route wherever you are. Hovering a page button says which slots it holds and how many are free.

Beside those buttons a count reads n / 64 used. It counts the whole table, because the question it answers is whether there is room left anywhere. A page with no free slots dims its own number.

You will not often go looking, because dragging a source onto a knob fills the first empty slot wherever it is. The page you are on changes nothing about the sound, and a freshly opened editor starts on page one.

Finding a destination

The destination list is grouped. The grain controls come first. Then two headings for the per-grain processors in section 9: Grain filter with Cutoff and Res under it, and Grain compressor with Across and Within. Then the effects, by family, with a submenu for each effect that lists its copies and their controls, so a route to the second reverb's size is Reverb 2, then Size.

Destinations with no dial

Three destinations exist only here. They have no knob on the panel, they sit at a neutral value, and a route is the only thing that ever moves them. Each of them is per-grain by nature, and a single dial for a value that wants to be different on every grain would be the wrong control.

Destination	Range	What it does
Pan	-1 to +1	Where in the stereo field a grain sits, before Spread scatters it. It rests dead centre. Spread then throws each grain left and right around wherever Pan is, so the two stack: with Spread at zero, a route on Pan moves the whole cloud as one, and with Spread up, the scatter rides on top of it. A random source on Pan is very nearly what Spread already does, so the routes worth making are the slow and deliberate ones. An LFO drifts the cloud side to side. Keytrack puts low notes to the left. And since Pan takes a layer scope, you can sit the main sound left and the morph layer right.
Level Rnd	0 to 36 dB	How much each grain may be randomly quietened by. Every grain draws its own amount between nothing and this, so it only ever takes level away. A little is a flicker over the cloud that keeps a steady stream from sounding mechanical; a lot drops grains almost out and thins the texture into glitter. The Shimmer macro is wired to it out of the box, which is where that macro's sparkle comes from.
Level	0 to 2	A plain gain on each grain, resting at 1. Use it when you want a source to shape loudness per grain without the randomness Level Rnd brings.

Layer scope

Full version.

Every row in the Routing drawer carries the same AB | A | B selector the split dials in section 5 wear, and it answers the same question: which layer this route is allowed to touch. So LFO 1 can modulate the main sound while LFO 2 modulates the morph layer. AB is the default and what every older preset loads as, so nothing you already have moves.

The row's selector stays clickable with no morph layer loaded, because a route can be set up before the second sound arrives. It has nothing to act on until then: with one sound every grain is a layer A grain, so a route set to B is silent until you load a layer for it to reach.

A scope bites where the engine decides a value after it knows which layer the grain is reading. Some destinations are settled before that point or are not per-grain at all, and those cannot honour a split: their selector is drawn flat on AB, and its tooltip names the destination and says the route reaches both layers.

Group	Destinations
Takes a layer	Pitch, Spread, Shape, Pan, Level Rnd, Level, and all four per-grain processor controls: Grain Cutoff, Grain Res, Grain Comp Across, Grain Comp Within.
Always both	Density, which drives the one grain clock both layers are spawned from, and every effect control, because the rack runs on the summed output long after any grain has a layer (each effect has its own layer selector instead; see section 10). Plus the ones that place the grain in the first place: Position, Grain Size, Jitter, Magnet, Cohere, Scan, Morph and B Pos, because in Scatter and Onset those decide which layer the grain reads, so scoping them would be circular.

Blend, Resonator and Follow ignore scope entirely. A grain in any of those three reads both layers through one window, so it is neither A nor B and every route reaches it. In those morph modes the selector goes inert on every row and says why. Your choice is kept, and the row still shows what the preset carries; it comes back into force in the other three modes.

One shortcut: a route you make by dropping a source straight onto one of the split dials starts on the layer that dial's selector is showing. In practice that only shows on Pitch: drop a source on it while it reads A and the route is scoped to A. Position, Grain Size and Scan are on the "always both" list above, so those dials make an AB route whatever their selector says, and in state B they are not modulation targets at all.

9   The grain processors

Full version. Both of them.

The Filter and Comp tabs of the Motion card hold two processors that are not part of the effects rack and do not work like it. The rack in section 10 sits after everything, on the finished stereo mix, once per block. These two run inside the engine, on each grain as it is generated, with that grain's own state.

That difference is the point of them. A filter on the mix has one cutoff at a time. A filter on the grain has a cutoff per grain, so it can be a different value on every single one, which is why the headline route for it is Grain Rnd onto Grain Cutoff, and why a grain compressor can even out grains taken from a sample whose level wanders, something no compressor on the output can do.

The grain filter

Control	Range	What it does
Mode	5 types	Off, Low Pass, High Pass, Band Pass or Notch. Off is a true bypass: the filter is not in the grain's path at all.
Cutoff	20 Hz to 20 kHz	Where the filter bites. Each grain takes its own copy of this value at the moment it is born and keeps it for its whole life, which is what makes it worth modulating per grain.
Res	0.5 to 8	How sharply it rings at the cutoff. 0.7 is flat; up high it whistles at the cutoff pitch.

The filter runs on the raw grain before its window is applied, so the window still takes the grain cleanly to silence at both ends and nothing rings past it into a click. Each grain starts with the filter cleared, so it can never inherit the ringing of the grain before it.

The two dials are also modulation destinations, named Grain Cutoff and Grain Res in the Routing drawer. Cutoff is modulated in octaves rather than in hertz, so a route at full depth sweeps the whole range and a small depth means the same musical amount wherever the dial is parked. Drop the Grain Rnd chip on the cutoff dial and every grain lands somewhere different: at a low depth this is a shimmer over the cloud, at full depth every grain is a different colour.

The dials rest while Mode reads Off.

The grain compressor

Two knobs and a mode. The knobs do two different jobs, and both are off at zero.

Control	Range	What it does
Across	0 to 1	Evens the loudness between grains. Each grain gets one gain, decided when it is born, from how loud the sample is where that grain is reading. Grains lifted out of a quiet passage arrive at the same loudness as grains from a loud one, so scanning through a sample whose level wanders stops being a ride on the fader.
Within	0 to 1	Compresses the dynamics inside a single grain, flattening its own attack and decay as it plays. Long grains hold instead of falling away; a grain cut across a transient stops being mostly transient.
Mode	3 types	Shared by both knobs, so it means the same thing on either. See below.

Mode	What it does
Radical	Flattens hard, and starts doing it in the first third of the knob. All the way up, every grain lands on the same level.
Threshold	A traditional compressor. Grains above the threshold are pushed back down, quiet ones are left alone, and an automatic make-up gain brings the whole thing back up so a normal grain comes out where it went in.
Inverse	The same curve pushed past flat, so the order comes out backwards: loud grains end up quieter than quiet ones. Past halfway on the knob the sample's own dynamics are turned inside out. It is a sound design effect.

Everything is limited to 24 dB in each direction, so a near-silent grain is not lifted into the noise floor and a loud one is not wiped out. Within uses a fast attack and a short release fixed in real time rather than in grain lengths, so a 20 ms grain and a 400 ms grain hear the same compressor; the short one simply does not live long enough to get far into the release.

10   The effects rack

Full version.

The FX button in the footer opens the rack. It holds only the effects you put there, in a row that runs left to right in the order the sound passes through them and scrolls sideways once it is wider than the drawer. A new instance, and Init, start with an empty rack.

Adding effects

+ Add effect at the end of the row opens the list, grouped into Filter and tone, Drive, Dynamics, Modulation, Space and Stereo. Pick one and it joins the end of the chain, switched on. You can have up to three copies of each effect; a second copy is named, for example, Delay 2, and has settings of its own.

The strip

Every effect is a strip. Across the top is a grip, the name, a power light, a fold arrow and an x. Under that is a live picture of what the effect is doing, then its choices and knobs, and at the foot the effect's Mix (or Output, on effects with no mix) beside an AB | A | B layer selector.

• Drag a strip by its header to move it along the chain. Right-click the header for Move left, Move right, Switch off, Fold and Remove.
• The power light switches an effect off and leaves it in the rack, dimmed, with its settings. An effect that is off, or sitting at its neutral setting, is skipped entirely and costs nothing.
• The fold arrow shrinks a strip to a thin upright bar with its name and power light, so a long chain fits in view. Click the arrow again to open it.
• The x takes the effect out of the rack. Its settings are kept, so adding it again brings it back as you left it.

On the drawer's title line, Bypass all takes the whole rack out without touching a setting, so the rack costs nothing while it is bypassed and everything is where you left it when you switch back. It is a host parameter, so you can automate it. Clear takes every effect out of the rack.

Only the effects in the rack make a sound. Automation and modulation routes move an effect's controls, but they never add an effect to the rack, so a lane drawn for an effect you have since removed does nothing until you add it again.

Sessions and presets saved in 2.8 open with the seven effects 2.8 had, in the order you left them. The presets that come with Murmur carry their own rack.

The effects

Effect	What it does
Filter	One knob whose centre is always off, and a Type that decides what the travel either side of centre does. At LP / HP, left darkens with a low pass and right thins with a high pass. At Band, both directions sweep the same band pass, from 20 Hz at the centre up to 20 kHz at either end, and Res becomes its bandwidth. Res adds resonance, Slope picks 12 or 24 dB per octave, and Mix blends the filtered signal against the untouched one. This is the filter on the finished mix; the one in section 9 is a filter per grain.
EQ	Three bands. Low and High are shelves around 110 Hz and 7.5 kHz, Mid is a bell at Freq (200 Hz to 8 kHz), each ±15 dB, with an Output trim of ±12 dB.
Comb	A short tuned delay fed back on itself, which rings at Freq (20 Hz to 2 kHz). Feedback sets how strongly it rings, and below centre it rings an octave lower and hollower. Damp lets the highs die away first.
Formant	Vowel shapes over the cloud. Vowel moves through them, Res sharpens them, Shift moves them ±12 semitones.
Saturate	Pushes the cloud into distortion for warmth and grit. Drive is how hard, Tone tilts it dark or bright, Mode is Soft (rounded, tape-like) or Hard (clipped), and Mix is parallel so you can drive it far harder than you would want to hear alone.
Tape	The cloud played back off a worn cassette. Age rounds the highs and saturates the peaks, Wow is slow pitch drift, Flutter a fast fine wobble.
Bitcrush	Bits from 16 down to 1 and a sample Rate from 48 kHz down to 250 Hz, for anything from a little grit to a broken toy.
Fold	Wavefolding: Drive folds the peaks back on themselves for bright, buzzy overtones, and Bias makes the folding lopsided.
Squash	Holds the loud parts down and lifts the quiet ones up, which turns a sparse cloud into a wall. Speed sets how fast it reacts, Tilt leans it toward one job or the other, and Mix gives you parallel compression.
Gate	Chops the cloud into steps locked to the host tempo, at 1/8, 1/16 or 1/32. Depth is how far it closes between steps, Length how much of each step it stays open, and Swing delays every second step.
Transient	Attack and Sustain, each either way: sharpen or soften the front of each sound, lengthen or shorten its tail.
Chorus	A slowly detuned copy alongside the cloud, so it widens instead of sitting still. Depth, Rate, Feedback and Mix.
Phaser	Moving notches sweeping through the cloud. Depth, Rate, Feedback and Mix.
Flanger	A short swept delay for the jet-plane sweep. Depth, Rate, Feedback and Mix.
Tremolo	Volume moving up and down. Sync picks Free or a note length from 1/2 to 1/32; at Free, Rate sets the speed from 0.1 to 20 Hz. Depth is how far it dips, and Width offsets the left and right pulses until, at the top, they alternate between the speakers.
Ring mod	Multiplies the cloud by a sine at Freq (1 Hz to 5 kHz), with Fine for ±100 cents, for bell-like and clangorous tones.
Freq shift	Shifts every frequency by the same number of hertz, up to ±2000, which pulls harmonics out of tune with each other. Feedback makes it spiral.
Delay	Tempo-locked echoes. Time is a note length from 1/16 to 1/2 including dotted 1/8, Mode is Normal, Ping-Pong, Reverse or Glitch, then Feedback and Mix.
Reverb	Small room up to endless tail. Size, Damp and Mix, plus Pre, the pre-delay from 0 to 200 ms that keeps a sound in front of its own space, and Shimmer, which feeds the tail back an octave up so it keeps climbing.
Cloud delay	Echoes that come back as a haze of grains. Sync picks Free or a note length; at Free, Time sets the gap from 20 ms to 2 s. Size is the length of the grains each echo is broken into, Spray scatters them around the echo time, and Feedback keeps the haze going.
Width	Stereo width from 0% (mono) to 200%, starting at 140%. It only changes the difference between the two sides, so the mono sum never moves. Output trims the level.

Every effect with a Mix blends its processed signal against the untouched one.

Effects on one layer

The AB | A | B selector at the foot of each strip points that effect at one layer: AB processes the whole instrument, A the main sound and B the morph layer. The layer an effect is not pointed at goes round it, so it gets no quieter, only less processed: reverb on the pad and none on the sample, a filter that eats one sound and leaves the other alone, and both at once in the same chain.

The chain order is still shared by both layers; what changes is which effects each layer passes through. Point every effect the same way and the rack runs once. Point them different ways and the chain runs twice, once per layer, each with its own filters, delay lines and reverb tails, so an effect on AB gives each layer its own tail. That second pass is the only extra cost, and you only pay it when you split.

Changing a selector takes a short fade, and tails carry on ringing. Two things it cannot split: a grain in Morph's Blend, Resonator or Follow mode reads both layers through one window, so those grains go through the rack whichever layer you point an effect at; and with no morph layer loaded there is only one sound, so every selector sits flat at AB until you load one. Pressing an inert selector says which of the two it is.

11   Recipes

Chop a loop on the grid

This is the setting that makes Murmur sound like the record instead of a granular plug-in, and it is easy to miss by ear because nothing on the panel is labelled as it. Load a drum loop and set:

Control	Value
Grain clock	Sync
Density	1/16 (in Sync the dial picks the note length)
Size	125 ms
Shape	exactly centre
Jitter	0
Scan	0

Three things have to be true at once for this to work, which is why it is hard to stumble on. The grains have to arrive on the grid, which is what Sync at 1/16 does. Each grain has to be exactly as long as the gap between them, so that they butt together and neither overlap nor leave a hole: at 120 BPM a sixteenth is 125 milliseconds, which is where that number comes from. And the window has to be flat, which is what Shape at centre gives you. The centre of the Shape dial is a flat top window that passes the middle of each grain untouched and only tapers the last fraction at each edge. Anywhere else on that dial every grain gets a fade over its whole length, which smears a chop into a texture. Jitter and Scan at zero keep the read point still so the pieces come out in order.

The one weakness is the 125: it is correct at 120 BPM and wrong everywhere else, so at 90 BPM the grains fall short of the grid and you hear gaps. Repeat is this recipe made automatic. It measures the gap between grid ticks at your actual tempo and sets every grain to exactly that, which is why it takes Size and Shape away from you while it is on. Use the recipe to understand what is happening; use Repeat when you want it to keep working after you change the tempo.

Magnet on drums

Turn Jitter up until the grains scatter and the groove falls apart, then bring Magnet up. The scatter stays, but every grain is dragged onto a real hit, so it lands in time. Somewhere in the middle is a loop that breathes without losing the pocket. Use Slices to decide how many hits count as targets; in Classic the boundaries show while Magnet is up, so you can see them.

Cohere turns texture into tone

Load something pitched: a vocal note, a sustained synth, a bowed string. Check the Tune readout has found a key. Cohere trusts the audio's own pitch analysis, never the filename, so a sample named Gm.wav only locks to G if the sound repeats there. Now bring Cohere up. Grain timing, position and length lock to the pitch period and the cloud folds into a solid, oscillator-like tone you can play chords with, at the same loudness. Back it off and it dissolves into texture again.

How hard it locks follows how sure the detection is. A clear note gets the full lock, a weakly pitched texture gets a proportionally gentler pull, and on material with no usable pitch the dial dims and its tooltip names the reason. On strongly pitched simple tones the middle of the travel can dip and comb a little (that is the partial lock, halfway between scattered and phase-aligned grains), so the sweet spots are the low third, where it is still texture, and the very top, where it is a tone.

A pattern that is not a loop

Slice a bar into 8 with Steps, then in the sequencer point two steps at the same slice, switch one step off and set another to 50% on the Prob lane. Set Order to Ping-Pong. You now have a phrase that repeats over four bars instead of one, and because the probability is seeded it still renders identically every time you bounce it.

Grains as the tone

Set the grain clock to Key. The grain rate now follows the note you play, so the stream itself is the pitch and Density rests. Whatever key the sample is in stops mattering: you are playing the grain train, not the recording, so it is in tune chromatically across the keyboard. Keep Size short, somewhere around 20 to 40 ms. At Key rate the grain rate is the note frequency, so a long grain overlaps many copies of itself per cycle and the pitch smears into a wash. Short Size and a sharp Shape give a hard, buzzy oscillator; long and soft gives something more like a formant pad. The Tone template is this setting ready made.

A different colour on every grain

On the Motion card's Filter tab, set Mode to Low Pass and park the cutoff somewhere in the middle. Then drag the Grain Rnd chip from the footer onto the cutoff dial and pull the ring up. Every grain now takes its own cutoff at the moment it is born and keeps it, so a cloud that was one colour becomes hundreds of them. A small depth is a shimmer over the top; full depth spreads the grains across the whole range. Turn Density down until you can hear individual grains while you set the depth, then put it back.

12   Presets

Click the preset name in the header to open the browser, and click a name in the list to load it. Type a name and press Save to save, which asks before overwriting. Delete removes the selected preset after asking, and Init resets every parameter, restores the factory macro routes, empties the effects rack and unloads the sample. The chevrons either side of the name step through the list without opening the browser.

The order the list is in

Presets that carry no audio come first, then the ones with a sample inside them, and each half is alphabetical within itself.

The reason is what a preset without audio does when you load it: nothing to the sample. It keeps whatever you already have and reshapes it. That is the whole point of a template, but it makes a bad neighbour for a preset that does bring its own sound. Step off a drum kit straight onto a settings-only preset written for a pad and you hear the drums through pad settings, which sounds broken when the preset is fine. Putting them first means a walk down the list meets them against whatever you loaded yourself, where they make sense, and every preset after that brings its own material with it.

The grouping is read from the preset file, so a preset you saved a second ago lands in the right half. The browser and the chevrons read the same list.

The presets that come with Murmur

The installer puts down 32 presets. Nine are templates: Start Here, Soft Pad, Frozen, Grain Cloud, Chop Kit, Beat Grid, The Chop, Magnet Drums and Tone. Each one carries settings and no audio, so loading one leaves whatever sample you already have in place, and dropping a new file in gives you your own material shaped that way. They are built from free controls only, so all nine play in full on the free version.

Template	What it sets up
Start Here	The plainest useful sound: mid grains, a little Spread, nothing exotic. Tune on.
Soft Pad	Long grains (420 ms), a soft window and a slow envelope, so chords hold and bloom.
Frozen	Almost no Jitter and no Scan: one point in the sample, held still, with a long attack and release.
Grain Cloud	Short grains with Jitter and Spread up, for a scattered, airy field.
Chop Kit	Slice mode on detected transients, one key per slice, with a fast envelope.
Beat Grid	Slice mode on a Grid note value instead of transients, so the chops are even whatever the sample does.
The Chop	The chop recipe from section 11, ready made: Sync, Size 125 ms, Shape dead centre, Jitter and Scan at zero.
Magnet Drums	Jitter on and Magnet at 0.85, so every grain is pulled onto a transient. Made for loops.
Tone	Key rate with 26 ms grains: the grain train is the note, so you play it chromatically.

The other 23 bring their own audio, so they sound the moment they load: Classic 1 to 9, Slice 1 to 6, Walk 1 to 3, Drum Slice 1 and 2, Morph 1 and 2, and Piano 1. They use the full version's effects, modulation, Repeat, Morph or Walk, so the free browser leaves them out (section 14).

They live in a folder the installer owns and Murmur never writes to (macOS /Library/Application Support/Sounds Like You/Murmur/Presets/, Windows C:\ProgramData\Sounds Like You\Murmur\Presets\), and a preset of your own with the same name takes precedence in the list.

Your own presets

A preset is a .murmur file, and the sample travels inside it, whatever its length. You can send someone a preset and it will open on their machine with the sound intact. The audio is stored losslessly (24-bit FLAC), which costs about 5 MB per minute of sample for typical material at 48 kHz, and about 9 MB per minute at most. Your DAW session stores the audio the same way, so reopening a project never asks you to find anything. A preset also carries its effects rack and its routes.

Drop a .murmur file someone sent you into your preset folder from section 1 and it appears in the browser. If it was made with parts of the full version you do not have, it still opens and keeps everything it holds; those parts simply sit inert until a key is entered.

13   Licence

Murmur is free, and a key adds the rest of it. Section 2 has the list of what a key adds. There is no trial: nothing counts down, nothing expires, and the free version never goes silent.

Click Unlock to open the licence panel. Nothing else opens it: Murmur never interrupts you with it.

Entering a key

Your key arrives by email after you buy. It is one long line starting MURMUR. There are two ways to enter it, and they do the same thing:

• Paste it into the field in the licence panel and press Activate, or just press Return. The field accepts a key that an email client has wrapped across several lines, and it strips whitespace for you.
• Drag the licence file onto the Murmur window, from anywhere on it. You do not need to open the licence panel first; it appears with the result.

On success the panel says so, Unlock and Buy disappear, and every full-version control comes alive immediately. There is no restart, no reopening the plug-in and no reloading the session. If you were part way through a track, keep going: a morph layer or a Walk pattern that was sitting inert in the session starts working on the spot.

If the key is not accepted, the panel stays open and tells you. The most common cause is a partial copy, so select the whole thing including MURMUR. at the front.

The licence check and your privacy

Nothing is sent anywhere. The key carries a signature, and Murmur verifies it against a public key compiled into the plug-in. That is arithmetic on your own machine. There is no activation server, no account, no online check, no machine fingerprint and no limit on the number of your own computers you install it on. The licence is for one person, though, and can't be shared (clause 2.2 of the licence agreement). It works with no internet connection.

The only time Murmur contacts the network is the once-a-day update check described in section 1, which carries no identifier and no licence data.

Refunds

The one thing that can end a licence is a refund. If you get your money back, the licence goes with it (clause 8.3 of the licence agreement) and Murmur returns to the free version.

That adds nothing to the request. The once-a-day file in section 1 also carries a list of refunded licences, as one-way hashes rather than anybody's key, email or order number, and Murmur compares its own licence against that list on your machine. Your key never leaves the computer, and the website is never told who is asking.

Nothing is deleted and nothing goes quiet. Your presets, samples and sessions are exactly as they were, the free version keeps working the way it always has, and buying again opens the rest back up. If the check cannot reach the website, or what comes back is not a valid list, your licence is left alone: only a clear match in a well-formed list changes anything.

The licence file

Your key is stored per user, outside your projects:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Sounds Like You/Murmur/settings.properties
Windows: %APPDATA%\Sounds Like You\Murmur\settings.properties

It is not stored in the plug-in's state, so a preset made on a licensed machine carries no licence, and a session file never contains your key. Every instance of Murmur on the machine reads the same one, so you enter the key once.

14   Troubleshooting

Murmur does not appear in my DAW

Quit the DAW, then rescan plug-ins. Most hosts have a rescan or "clear cache and rescan" button in their plug-in preferences. Check the file really is in the folder listed in section 1. On Windows, make sure you copied the whole Murmur.vst3 folder (the file inside it will not load on its own), and that the computer runs Windows 10 or 11. In Logic and GarageBand the first launch can take a minute while the Audio Unit is validated.

The Windows installer stops before it starts

It does that on Windows 8.1 and older, which Murmur does not support. It needs Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit. There is no separate Visual C++ download to install on any version.

A file will not load

Murmur loads WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 and Ogg files. On Windows that includes MP3s with a sample rate of 24 kHz or lower, which older versions refused. If a file still refuses, convert it to WAV and try again, and if that file loads, send the original to support so we can see why.

No sound

Check a sample is loaded: the file name shows above the waveform. With nothing loaded there is nothing to granulate. Then check Out is up and the meter is moving. The licence is not a cause: the free version is never silent.

One case that looks like silence but is not: in Slice mode the keyboard starts at C1 and runs upward one slice per semitone. Notes below C1, or above the last slice, do not play. Try playing around C1.

And one for offline renders only: on a mono output, Murmur renders silence if the renderer asks for blocks bigger than 65,536 samples. Set the renderer's buffer size to that or below, or put Murmur on a stereo track, and it bounces normally. Stereo outputs render at any buffer size.

No effects, though the preset had them

Only the effects in the rack make a sound. Open the FX drawer: if the rack is empty, or the effect you expected is switched off, add it or switch it on. Automation for an effect that is not in the rack does nothing until it is added.

A control is dim and will not move

Press it: a control that is resting tells you why for a few seconds. The common reasons are these. It is part of the full version, and section 2 lists which ones. Or it is resting because of another setting: Density in Key mode, Size and Shape while Repeat is on, Pos in Slice and Walk mode, Slices while the boundaries are authored, the grain filter's dials while its Mode reads Off, Cohere when the sample has no confident pitch (it still moves, and still pulls gently), and Morph until a second layer is loaded. The AB | A | B selectors and Pin need a morph layer before there is anything to split, and Glide only appears at Mono.

Some of the layer controls go flat rather than dim, which means the same thing: the choice cannot apply here. Size's selector, the density ratio under Density and Walk's B sequence are all locked in the Blend, Resonator and Follow morph modes, because a grain in those three reads both layers through one window and belongs to neither. A routing row's selector is locked for the same three modes, and also for a destination that is not per-layer in any mode, and so is each effect's. Nothing you set is lost while a control is locked; sections 5 and 8 have the detail.

A preset is missing from the list

If you are running the free version, the browser only lists presets that will sound the way they were made. A preset that leans on anything in the right-hand column of the table in section 2 would come out thin and wrong rather than obviously locked, so it is left out of the list. The nine starter templates are all free, so the free browser is never empty.

Nothing has happened to the file. It is still in its folder, it still holds everything it always did, and it comes back the moment a key is entered. Loading is not blocked either: a preset someone sends you opens by any other route with its state whole, and plays with its paid parts inert.

A session I made when licensed opens without its morph layer

Expected, and nothing is lost. In the free version the second layer's violet lane is not drawn and the grains all come from the first sound, but the sample is still inside the session file. A free instance cannot eject it or overwrite it, so it survives. Enter a key and the lane reappears, with the Morph dial exactly where you left it. The same is true of a Walk pattern: it stays in the file.

macOS will not open an unsigned build

Release installers are notarized and open cleanly. If you were handed a dev build, Control-click it in Finder and choose Open, then confirm. You only do that once. Alternatively use System Settings, Privacy and Security and click Open Anyway.

The sample sounds wrong after changing sample rate

Samples are resampled when they load, not when the device rate changes. If you switch your interface between 44.1 and 48 kHz mid-session, reload the sample or reopen the project so it is prepared at the new rate.

Walk keeps going when I stop the transport

With Trig off, the step clock runs free while the transport is stopped, so the phrase carries on as long as you hold a note. Turn Trig on in the Walk drawer and the pattern restarts from step 1 on each note instead, and waits on step 1 when nothing is playing.

CPU is too high

Drop Voices first: 16 voices of dense granular is a lot, and most parts need four. Then drop Density, since every grain is real work. Then look at the effects rack: every effect that is switched on costs something, and the chain runs twice when effects are pointed at different layers. Switching an effect off with its power light takes it out of the chain completely.

A preset opened without its sound

Every preset saved by this version carries its audio inside the file. Presets saved by older versions from samples longer than 60 seconds referenced the sample on disk instead, and when that file is missing, Murmur names it over the display. Drop the file back on the display and re-save the preset to embed it for good.

15   Support

Email support@soundslikeyoumusic.com. Tell us your operating system, your DAW, and the version number, which you can read by hovering the Murmur wordmark in the header or at the bottom of the settings menu.

Found a bug, or want a feature? Tell us at soundslikeyoumusic.com/murmur/feedback. The changelog for every release lives at soundslikeyoumusic.com/murmur/changelog.

Third-party licences

Murmur ships with third-party components: the VST3 SDK, the FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, zlib, libpng and libjpeg libraries bundled with JUCE, and four font families under the SIL Open Font License. Their full notices are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt, shown by the macOS installer and installed alongside the Windows standalone. VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.