Baby Audio has released Grainferno, a granular synthesizer plugin that breaks audio samples into microscopic fragments and rebuilds them into new sounds. It’s available at an introductory price of $79 (regular $129).
Grainferno works by generating grains from any loaded audio file and letting you manipulate how those grains are created, shaped, and played back. You can drag and drop samples from your DAW or computer, or browse through the built-in factory library of 378 royalty-free audio files.
Fun with grains
One of Grainferno’s main tricks is that its grain engine can generate grains fast enough to enter the audio rate range.
At those speeds, grains stop behaving like texture and start acting like oscillators. This basically turns any sample into a playable synth voice that stays in tune with your song.
The Rate control offers key-mapped modes that sync the synthesized pitch to incoming MIDI notes. I love how even at audio rates, traces of the original sample’s character remain, giving you tonal building blocks with the spectral fingerprint of your source material.
Morphing
Grainferno can load two samples simultaneously and morph between them in real time.
There are seven morphing modes (Crossfade, Follow, Weave, 4-Bit, 8-Bit, Random, and Bi Follow), each producing different results as grains shift between the two sources.
I had a lot of fun experimenting with the morphing modes to create textures that continuously evolve between the characters of each sample. This is incredibly useful for cinematic sound design, but can obviously work well in electronic and experimental music, too.
Granular controls
The four main granular controls are Rate (grain generation speed), Size (grain length), Scan (moves the playhead through the sample), and Scatter (randomizes the grain position). These interact with each other and produce very different results depending on the source material.
Rate and Scan can both be synced to the host tempo in BPM mode, which is, of course, handy for keeping rhythmic material in time.
Grain effects
Grainferno has three per-grain effects that shape each grain at the moment of generation.
G-Filter is a multimodal filter (low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, band-reject) applied to individual grains.
G-Comp handles per-grain dynamics with multiple detection modes, including an inverse mode that makes louder grains quieter.
G-Blur adds feedback to the grain engine for a smearing effect, with a Violent mode that introduces ring modulation.
Modulation
The modulation system uses drag-and-drop to connect sources to destinations.
You get three envelopes, three LFOs, three random value generators, an envelope follower, and MIDI controller inputs (note, velocity, mod wheel, pitch wheel).
The LFOs have drawable waveshapes and a Grain Sync mode that locks modulation to the grain generation rate, creating per-grain modulation patterns. Cross-modulation between sources is also possible.
FX section
The onboard effects section includes EQ (with 12dB and 24dB multimode filters), compression (standard and OTT), six clipping/saturation styles, chorus/phaser/flanger, delay (with reverse and glitched modes), and reverb (with a shimmer mode).
The signal chain is reorderable, and nearly all effect parameters can be modulated.
Presets and specs
Grainferno ships with 325 presets from sound designers including Virtual Riot, Francis Preve, and dnksaus.
It also includes six factory templates (Grain, Tonal, Stretch, Slice, Chaos, Rhythmic) that let you quickly configure the plugin for different granular synthesis applications.
As for working with samples, it accepts WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis sample formats.
Grainferno is available in VST, VST3, AU, and AAX formats (64-bit), plus a standalone version. It runs on macOS 10.11 and up (including Apple Silicon) and Windows 10 and newer. A free trial is available, and the intro price is $79.
Download: Grainferno by Baby Audio ($79 intro, regular $129)
Last Updated on March 11, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
