Creative Effects
GRAINFREEZE
A granular processor that sweeps continuously between discrete echoes and dense evolving ambience.
Free 10-day trial. The download is the whole collection, 22 plug-ins in one installer, so you can try every one; start GRAINFREEZE's trial from inside the plug-in when you are ready. Downloading does not start it, and trying one plug-in does not start the others.
- AU (macOS)
- VST3
- AAX
- macOS Universal
- Windows 64-bit
- v1.0.0
What it does
Where an echo becomes a cloud.
Discrete rhythmic echoes and dense evolving ambience are usually two separate products. GRAINFREEZE moves continuously between them, and the reason it is a sweep rather than a mode switch is architectural.
Grains are not summed to the output. They are injected into a recirculating diffusion network, the Ice Cloud Engine, and Bloom sets how much of each grain goes in. At zero a grain is an echo. At maximum it is an excitation that becomes a cloud. In between, it dissolves.
Movement comes from a procedural motion system rather than LFOs: fractal noise, random walks and swarms, every source normalised to the same standard deviation so depth means the same thing whichever one is routed. And an X/Y pad with a named climate at each corner moves a dozen controls at once, as offsets from your own settings rather than in place of them.
Key features
One control instead of a mode switch
Bloom sweeps from echo to cloud continuously. Level across the whole sweep varies 2.1 dB as a smooth arch, and L/R correlation falls from 0.98 to 0.07 across it.
A motion system, not an LFO
Fractal noise, random walks and swarms. Motion coherence falls monotonically across lane distance (0.99 → 0.97 → 0.52 → 0.01) and worst autocorrelation beyond one correlation length is 0.08, so it never settles into a pattern you can hear.
Swarm dispersion and modulation depth are decoupled
Exactly decoupled, and asserted: spreading the flock does not change modulation depth. That is the difference between a control you can use and two controls fighting each other.
Level holds still while everything else moves
0.5 dB across Bloom, 0.6 dB across Density, 0.8 dB across Size, 0.2 dB across Reverse. Pitching down two octaves costs no level at all; pitching up costs only what anti-aliasing requires.
Four climates on one pad
Fresh Snow, Blizzard, Ice Cave and Aurora sit at the corners, and every point between them is a blend of all four. The pad biases your own settings rather than replacing them, so the knobs beneath it never go dead; double-click takes it out of the picture.
Corrections that listen
Five adaptive corrections watch for smeared transients, high-frequency build-up, metallic ringing, masking and stereo collapse, each bounded and scaled by ADAPT. Switching them off changes the level by under 1.5 dB.
Freeze that actually holds
Ten seconds with no measurable decay in the grain engine, and −0.45 dB over sixty seconds in the cloud. A preset that loads frozen waits until the buffer has caught enough to hold (about a quarter of a second for the factory presets) rather than freezing silence.
The interface
How it works
The signal path, as the plugin’s own documentation states it.
input ──► INPUT ──► DC block ──► ICE BUFFER (8 s of history)
──► GRAINS (grain · density · position · spray · texture · reverse · pitch · frost · snow)
──┬── (1 − BLOOM) ────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
└── BLOOM ──► ICE CLOUD (diffusion network: size · ice age · diffusion)
▼
sum ──► tilt and character ──► FEEDBACK (low cut · high cut · limiter) ──► back into the ice buffer
──► SPACE (width · aurora rotation) ──► MIX ──► OUTPUT ──► out
motion system ──► drift · motion · detail, reaching grains, cloud and spaceAudio
Audio demos for GRAINFREEZE are not published yet.
We would rather show you nothing than show you a demo that was not recorded through this plugin.
Measured
GrainfreezeTests, GrainfreezePluginTests and GrainfreezeBench · 48 kHz · pluginval and auval from the release audit
- CPU, default patch
- 1.75 % of one core
- CPU, absolute maximum density
- 3.3 %
- Latency
- 0 samples
- Cloud decay accuracy, undamped
- within 3 % of requested
- Cloud stereo correlation from a mono input, no widener
- 0.007 – 0.06
- Grain interpolator reconstruction error
- −61 to −76 dB
- Block-size invariance
- bit-identical at any host buffer size
- Allocations in processBlock
- zero
- pluginval
- strictness 10, AU and VST3
- auval
- passes, including 192 kHz, 11 kHz and 4096-frame blocks
Figures are produced by this plugin’s own test suite and benchmark, on the hardware and sample rate named above. They are not estimates.
Controls
Header
- Preset
- Previous, next, or click the name to browse by category; SAVE writes a user preset.
- Character
- Crystal, Ice, Frost, Glacier or Aurora: five colours that bias the grains, the cloud and the stereo field.
- FREEZE
- Holds the ice buffer and the cloud. Pressed during playback it engages at once; from a cold start it waits for something to hold.
- A / B · COPY
- Two states to compare, and a copy from one to the other.
- UNDO / REDO
- Parameter changes.
- Power
- Bypass, crossfaded over 20 ms with the engine still running underneath.
Display and pad
- Grain display
- The live grains: across is each grain's place in the stereo field, size is how far back it reads, down is its age. Below it, GRAINS, DEEP, DECAY and CLOUD.
- Climate pad
- Ice Cave, Aurora, Fresh Snow and Blizzard at the corners. Touching it brings it in; double-click takes it out.
ICE CLOUD
- BLOOM
- How much of each grain goes into the cloud: an echo at zero, a cloud at maximum.
- THAW
- Bloom run backwards on a live cloud: new grains turn long and regular while the cloud already there decays.
- SIZE
- The size of the cloud.
- ICE AGE
- How long the cloud takes to decay.
- DIFFUSION
- How densely each grain is smeared.
- FEEDBACK
- How much of the output returns to the ice buffer, through the cut filters and a limiter.
GRAINS
- GRAIN
- Grain length, 12 ms to 1.2 s.
- DENSITY
- How many grains exist at once.
- POSITION
- How far back in the ice buffer grains are drawn from.
- SPRAY
- Random scatter on that read position, per grain.
- TEXTURE
- How much length and rate vary from grain to grain.
- REVERSE
- The chance that any grain plays backwards. Between the ends, a mix in one cloud.
CRYSTAL
- PITCH
- ±24 semitones, in whole semitones. Pitch is the grain's playback rate, so it adds no latency.
- DETUNE
- ±50 cents.
- FROST
- Per-grain harmonic scatter, drawn from the swarm, so the cloud tightens towards something tonal and disperses into a wash on its own schedule.
- SNOW
- High, short micro-grains that sparkle above the main texture.
MOTION
- DRIFT
- How strongly the motion system reaches the grains.
- AURORA
- A slow stereo rotation that never comes back to where it started.
- MOTION
- How fast the motion system moves.
- DETAIL
- How much fine structure is in that movement.
SPACE & TONE
- WIDTH
- Stereo width, 0 to 200 %.
- SPREAD
- How widely grains are scattered across the stereo field.
- LOW CUT / HIGH CUT
- The cloud's and the feedback loop's low and high cut.
- TILT
- ±9 dB.
- ADAPT
- How strongly the adaptive corrections act. Zero turns them off.
OUTPUT
- INPUT
- ±24 dB.
- MIX
- Equal-power, so the middle does not dip.
- OUTPUT
- ±24 dB.
Technical details
- Formats, macOS
- AU · VST3 · AAX
- Formats, Windows
- VST3 · AAX
- Operating system
- macOS 10.15 or later · Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
- Architecture, macOS
- Universal: Apple Silicon and Intel
- Architecture, Windows
- 64-bit
- Plugin code
- Glcr
- Version
- 1.0.0
- Latency
- 0 samples
- CPU
- 1.75 % of one core at default, 3.3 % at maximum density
- Factory presets
- 105
Across eight categories, from Ambient to Experimental, each walking from the conservative to the extreme. None arrives fully wet, and none moves Input or Output, so A/B comparison stays fair.
Worth knowing
- Pitch shifting is granular, built into each grain's playback rate. On a solo sustained voice shifted up an octave with Bloom at zero it is less smooth than a dedicated pitch shifter; from about a third of the way up Bloom the cloud makes the difference inaudible.
- One parameter, Diffusion Size, has no knob on the panel. It is reachable from the host's automation and is stored in presets.
Also in these bundles
COMPLETE COLLECTION
Get GRAINFREEZE as part of COMPLETE COLLECTION, 22 plugins worth 708 for 199.
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