The Mangle

I've never really used grain stuff, from now on I certainly will.

Good:

• Easy to use with a great minimalistic yet intuitive interface.
• Light on CPU and seemed stable so far (v1.1.1).
• Versatile options to set up a sound / preset / programm; what I also mean with this is that there are intuitive and many ways to modulate certain values inside a preset / programm (e.g. with random generators, LFOs, envelops, etc.).
• The price almost is ridiculous. I tried other grain synths, which were five times as expensive as this one. This one is so affordable yet at least equally powerful.
• Used sounds can be saved inside the preset or (as I personally prefer it) not in the preset, but with the path to a file (this saves storage space, in case you'll use the same sound again and again).

Could maybe better (ideas which could make some aspects maybe better in this plugin - so basically some kind of feature wishes):

• The amount of modulation is sometimes a bit hard to set up. On the one site it would be cool to have also some kind of numeric value to at least see when setting up the modulation amount, on the other site it would be great to be able to enter values. The detailed-tweaking you can get while holding Ctrl is rather weird, since it can jump quite quickly suddenly. IIRC other plugins did behave similar; so this might be some typical behaviour when it comes to detailed knob tweaking? Or framework dependend? What I want to say here: it's hard to set up minimal tweaks in knobs sometimes.
• Some values like the "position speed" cannot really be linked to an internal mod, AFAIK. It can be automated in the host, though.
• Not that important, but still would be MAYBE nice to have in some very rare situations: curve control for the envelopes.
• Nitpicky here: the default preset has the 8 slots spread through the whole keyboard, while I often times just want one slot for the whole keyboard. I made some own default preset having only the first slot spread through the whole keyboard (you can set it up luckily!!), which gets loaded in Reaper when I open this plugin. It's a really tiny and maybe stupid feedback here, but I just wanted to say it, since it felt weird that the first slot is set to one very low octave by default. (-;

Overall a big thanks to the dev! I am not sure if the development of this plugin is still going on. Writing this in 2022, while I can only see year numbers like 2015 or 2016 on the devs page, unfortunately. I wrote the dev and asked if the development is still going on; I'll see about that. But for now this plugin already works great. (=.

Also: some review here wrote that they bought it and never got a licence: I cannot second that. I bought it and immediately got my plugin. The price is so low anyway, omg ... seriously! (-;