FRCTL Audio GRN 2: granular plugin now with multi-FX rack, LFOs, and more

February 23, 2026 Synth Anatomy News, Plugins, Software 0

FRCTL Audio GRN 2.0 is a major update for its granular plugin, featuring a multi-FX rack, built-in LFOs, and more.

In recent months, there’s been a wave of new granular effect plugins. One slipped through the cracks on my news radar: FRCTL Audio GRN.

Now I can finally catch up because FRCTL Audio has released GRN 2, a free major update with great new features.

What Is FRCTL Audio GRN?

GRN 2 is a granular FX plugin for macOS, Linux, and Windows. FRCTL Audio has embraced the “less is more” approach with GRN 2.

The granular engine is very immediate, requiring only a few parameters, thus preventing musicians from being overwhelmed during sound design. It has six main grain parameters: spray, size, DAW-sycnable density, spread, pitch, and mix.

According to the developers, every parameter is tuned for musical results out of the box. The freeze option on the spray parameter lets you lock the buffer for evolving textures.

Additionally, you have pre/post highpass and lowpass filtering, a jitter control with a reverse option, and an output leveler.

Also onboard is. a pitch shifting section with quantization to a chosen scale. You can select from nine different ones: major, minor, pentatonic, and more. The focus here is also very much on the effect’s musicality.

Then it houses a flexible feedback engine that allows you to route the grain output back into the buffer, perfect for infinite sounds. The feedback character is fully tweakable with width, delay, and wobble.

You can spice up the sounds with a saturator with three modes: warm tube, crunch, each with a drive control. Plus, you can use another set of HP/LP filters that is applicable to the pre-, post-, or both signals.

New In FRCTL Audio GRN 2

The GRN 2 version is free for existing customers, and according to FRCTL Audio, updates are free for life. That’s very welcome, and the new update is impressive.

A highlight is the all-new FX rack that can be found on the second UI page. It transforms the simple granular FX plugin into a multi-FX processor. It has 10 freely reorderable slots, each of which can hold an FX.

These are the available effects: bit-crusher, chorus, delay, reverb, flanger, distortion, phaser, tremolo, utility, and filter. Each slot has per-effect animated visualizers, bypass toggle, and WET/DRY/BOTH routing to process the granular output, the dry signal, or both.

Further, GRN 2 introduces a modulation engine with two independent syncable LFOs offering sine, triangle, square, saw up, saw down, S&H, and random waveforms. Plus, you get bipolar depth control for inverted modulations.

You can route them to any parameter by simply dragging and dropping. Not just one, but multiple destinations can be carried by an LFO. Lastly, it now ships with 49 presets organized across seven categories.

First Impression

At first glance, a great update for the GRN plugin. The multi-FX section and LFOs set the plugin apart from other, simpler granular FX. It’s very positive that this is a free update and the price is very fair, plus it includes Linux support.

An iOS version would be very welcome. FRCTL Audio, if you’re reading this, the iOS users would be thrilled.

FRCTL Audio GRN 2 is available now for $29.99 (one-time purchase, lifetime free updates). It runs as a VST3, AU, and CLAP for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It’s a one-time purchase with lifetime free updates.

More information here: FRCTL Audio

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