Minimal Audio has released Lucid, a new real-time granular effect plugin for macOS and Windows.
We have covered Minimal Audio several times on BPB, including Current, Rift, and Morph EQ.
Lucid fits the same general pattern we’re used to from Minimal Audio. It looks sleek, works great for sound design, and makes a complex process feel more playable and musician-friendly.
Granular effects are great when you want huge pads, frozen textures, reverse swells, and weird rhythmic fragments, but they can also become hard to control. The main idea behind Lucid is to keep the results musical even when the processing gets extreme.
The two main features here are grain scale-locking and timeline sync.
Minimal Audio says grain scale-locking detects the pitch of each grain and retunes it to your chosen scale in real time. Timeline sync keeps stretching, freezing, scrubbing, and playback locked to your DAW session, so the processed audio follows the arrangement instead of drifting away from it.
That actually makes Lucid interesting for so much more than ambient sound design. You can drop it on vocals, synths, guitars, keys, drums, or a full loop and use it for tuned harmonies, rhythmic gating, pitch-locked shimmer, time-stretched transitions, and abstract textures.
The granular section includes controls for grain rate, grain size, window shape, jitter, stretch, scrub, reverse probability, spray, blur, and pitch. There are plenty of pitch modes, including re-pitch, free pitch shifting, and scale-based pitch correction.
There are also grain chord and arp modes that work so well for turning incoming audio into stacked harmonies or arpeggiated grain sequences.
Lucid also processes each grain individually with its own filter, imager, and delay. The grain filter offers multiple filter types with drive and modulation, the imager spreads grains across the stereo field, and the grain delay can create scale-locked shimmer, harmonies, and rhythmic spaces without simply echoing the entire signal.
Lucid includes an Animator Pad for performance and movement. It’s basically a single XY pad that controls two macro knobs at once. It can also animate those macros with synced patterns, which is fun for working with evolving textures and transitions without having to draw a huge amount of automation by hand.
The modulation system is shared with Minimal Audio’s flagship tools, Current and Rift. You can assign LFOs, curve sequencers, and envelope followers to almost any parameter, then manage everything from a full modulation matrix.
Lucid also includes an effects rack with eight swappable effects across up to 12 slots, including chorus, compressor, delay, distortion, EQ, filter, reverb, and shifter. The preset browser includes over 350 factory presets with searchable tags and pre-assigned macros.
Lucid is available now at the introductory price of $79, with the full price set at $129. It runs on macOS 10.11 or later, including native Apple Silicon support, and Windows 10 or later, in 64-bit VST2, VST3, AU, and AAX plugin formats.
Download: Minimal Audio Lucid ($79 intro)
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Last Updated on August 19, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
