What's new in Murmur 2.9
A new layout and an effects rack three times the size, free for everyone who owns Murmur.
Murmur has a new layout
The knobs under the display now sit on three plates.
| Spray | Jitter, Magnet, Spread |
|---|---|
| Grain | Size, Density, Pos, Morph |
| Pitch | Pitch, Cohere |
The mode buttons have moved onto the display, top left, and the drawers open from the buttons at the bottom right.
The strip between the display and the plates carries Scan, Shape, Slices, Grid, Tune, Scale, Key and Voices, and Glide joins them when you play in Mono.
The sound hasn't changed. Presets and saved sessions play back as they did in 2.8, apart from the FX filter fix further down.
Magnet and Cohere have swapped places
Magnet pulls grains toward the hits in your sample, which decides where they land, so it now sits in Spray between Jitter and Spread.
Cohere locks grains to the sample's pitch, so it moved to the Pitch plate, next to Pitch. Both work exactly as they did.
The rack has 21 effects, and up to three of each
2.8 had seven effects. 2.9 adds fourteen more, and you can load the same effect up to three times, so a short Delay can feed Tape and then a long Delay.
Only what's in the rack makes a sound. Automation or a modulation route aimed at an effect that isn't loaded does nothing until you add it back, and its routes are kept for when you do.
- Click FX at the bottom right to open the rack.
- Click + Add effect and pick one. The menu groups them by what they do: Filter and tone, Drive, Dynamics, Modulation, Space and Stereo.
- Pick the same effect again for a second copy, called Delay 2, then Delay 3. The menu shows how many of each are in.
- Drag a card by its header to change the order. Right-clicking the header gives you Move left, Move right, Switch off, Fold and Remove.
- The dot in a card's header switches the effect off and keeps its settings. The x takes it out of the rack, and adding it again brings the settings back.
- With a second sample loaded, AB, A and B at the foot of a card send that effect to both layers or to one.
The new effects
Filter, Saturate, Squash, Chorus, Phaser, Delay and Reverb are still there and work as they did.
Cloud delay
Echoes come back as a haze of grains instead of clean repeats.
Tape
An old cassette, with drifting pitch and softer highs.
EQ
A low shelf, a sweepable mid band and a high shelf.
Bitcrush
Lowers the bit depth and the sample rate.
Width
Makes the sound wider or narrower without changing how it sounds in mono.
Tremolo
Pulses the volume, free running or locked to your song's tempo.
Gate
Chops the sound into steps locked to the tempo.
Comb
Makes the sound ring at a pitch you set.
Formant
Puts vowel shapes on the sound.
Fold
Wraps loud peaks back on themselves.
Transient
Changes how hard each hit starts and how long it hangs on.
Flanger
A very short moving delay, for the jet plane whoosh.
Ring mod
Multiplies the sound by a sine wave, which makes it metallic.
Freq shift
Moves every frequency by the same number of hertz, so the harmonics stop lining up.
You can route modulation straight from the tabs
The LFO 1 and LFO 2 tabs on the Motion card, and the Amp, Env 2 and Env 3 tabs on the Envelope card, now drag onto a knob the same way the sources along the bottom do. A new route starts at 30%.
You can also set the direction of any route. Both ways moves the knob either side of where you set it, and One way pushes it in one direction only. In 2.8 the source decided this for you, and every route keeps that direction until you change it.
- Right-click a knob to see everything that moves it. Each route has its own depth slider and an x, and its arrow switches it between Both ways and One way.
- Click a source, or a tab that's already open, to light up its ring on every knob it moves. Drag a ring up or down to change the depth, and press Esc when you're done.
- If the rings get busy, go to Settings, Knob rings, When touched. A ring then shows only while you touch its knob, and a small dot marks every knob something is moving.
Constellation is a new way to draw the grain cloud
Constellation draws every grain as a sharp point of light on black, as bright as the sample is loud where that grain reads.
Constellation is the default. Nebula is a refined version of the 2.8 cloud, and Classic is the 2.8 cloud as it was. The choice only changes the picture. The sound stays the same, and Murmur remembers it for every instance you open.
- Click the gear at the top right.
- Go to Grain cloud and pick Constellation, Nebula or Classic.
Walk steps are drawn in lanes
The Walk drawer swaps the per-step sliders for lanes. Pick Level, Offset, Pitch or Prob under the steps and draw across them in one stroke. Double-click to reset.
With B sequence on, the drawer tells you whether you're editing A or B, and layer B gets its own playhead on the display. At 32 steps the step numbers shrink to fit.
The Walk button stays at the bottom right in every mode. Outside Walk it's dimmed until you pick Walk on the display.
Everything else that changed
- Grid has a new choice, Fit, under Transient. It stretches the slices across the whole sample, so 32 Walk steps on an eight bar loop are a beat each. With Steps on Auto it makes 16.
- In Sync, the Density knob steps through note lengths itself, so the separate division box is gone.
- Hz and Sync sit under the Motion card's Rate knob. The LFO's Draw shape has a new Pen mode for drawing a shape freehand, beside Points.
- Right-click the dice for a menu: Undo the last roll, or Load a random preset. A click still rolls the grain controls.
- When a control is resting because of another setting, pressing it tells you why for a few seconds. Density, for example, rests in Key mode, where the note you play sets the grain rate.
- In Classic mode the slice lines are hidden. The Slices switch on the display brings them back.
- The colour picker's Default swatch is now an ivory into violet gradient.
- The gear menu has Watch tutorials above Open manual. It opens the Murmur video tutorials on our site.
Fixed since 2.8
- The FX filter no longer clicks or drops out when modulation carries it across the middle of its knob. Res glides to a new value now too, so it moves smoothly when a preset changes while audio is playing.
- On a 120 Hz screen the editor draws about 60 frames a second, where 2.8 drew 40, and uses a little less CPU doing it.
- The Tune readout has room for a root you set by hand, so "C#3 · manual" keeps its last letter.
- On Windows, Murmur no longer needs the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime, so it opens on PCs that don't have it installed. It now needs Windows 10 or 11.
- On Windows, MP3s with a low sample rate, such as 22 kHz, load instead of failing with "could not decode".
Getting 2.9
Download the installer and run it. It replaces 2.8, and your licence key keeps working.
Sessions and presets from 2.8 open with the seven 2.8 effects in the rack, as you left them. The 32 presets that come with Murmur open showing only the effects they use.
Something not right after updating? Email support@soundslikeyoumusic.com.