Release notes
Small, real steps. Each entry below has its own page if you want the full story.
Each fractal oscillator gets a READ tab with two new ways to turn the fractal into sound. Spectral uses it as the level of each harmonic. Phase uses it to bend the phase of a sine like an FM operator, with a Ratio and a Tone control. Seven new presets show them off, and unison notes now start at full strength.
Thanks to Beatsbasteln for the idea behind Read mode, and for asking for the ratio and the shape control that became Tone.
A new theme called Ocean Drive, a sunset over the sea in hot pink and teal. Each oscillator gets an Octave control that stays a true octave in any tuning, and an open Laura window now costs about a third of what it did.
A performance release. The presets that use the convolution reverb cost about a quarter of what they did while playing and about 1% of a core on a silent track. An open Laura window costs about a third less, and a minimised one about half. None of it changes how a preset sounds or how the window looks.
Twelve fixes from going through the whole engine for the kind of bug behind last week's frozen output. The main ones: four effects ran away at sample rates below 40 kHz, the output guard from v1.7.1 could leave Laura silent until the next preset change, and Laura FX had no guard at all.
Thanks again to Beatsbasteln, whose hunch about buffer sizes and out-of-bounds reads started this whole search.
The limiter on Laura's output is gone. It compressed everything above -10 dBFS four to one and clipped the first samples of any loud attack, and sub-heavy patches paid for it at levels that didn't feel loud. The plugins now hand the host exactly what the patch makes. This release also fixes the reverb bug behind last week's frozen output, a read past the end of a delay buffer, and a crash when a host sends a bigger buffer than it announced.
Thanks to Beatsbasteln for both reports, and for the hunch about the out-of-bounds read, which was exactly right.
Eleven fixes on the voice side. A drawn MSEG envelope now plays its release instead of fading out in fifty milliseconds, the sustain pedal reaches MPE notes, a mono voice can no longer be left droning by a pedal lift, and a dozen modulation paths that used to step at the block edge now ramp.
A new effect for the rack, in Laura and Laura FX both. Zap Gate is a sixteen step trance gate where every opening also fires a resonant filter sweep, with a level, a sweep pitch and a ratchet count on every step. Also in this release: the download is about a third smaller, and updates fetch far less than they used to.
With a long release, tails from earlier notes never finished and never gave their voice back, so a part that should have been a wash of overlapping releases collapsed to a single note with the voice meter reading full. Fixed, along with a transpose that ignored your tuning, a path retrigger that did nothing on a synced division, and two much slower path speeds.
The stuck voices, the transpose and the path retrigger were all found by Beatsbasteln, who writes in tunings I had to go and read about, and describes what he hears precisely enough that I can reproduce it before I start guessing.
Undo now takes back one control instead of everything you have touched, the preset browser lets you listen through the library before you commit, every routing gets a mute and a curve, and a long release no longer disappears the moment you touch an envelope knob.
The envelope bug and the tempo sync drift were both found by beatsbasteln, who pushed the fractal modulation hard enough to hit them and then described what he heard precisely enough for me to reproduce it. Neither would have turned up in my own testing.
Each of the seventeen effects now draws its own small symbol in its title bar, so you can tell a chain apart at a glance instead of reading every name. The cards got a lighting pass with it, and two visual bugs went out.
On Windows, updating from inside your DAW could leave you stuck: the installer needed the DAW closed before it could replace the plugin, but closing the DAW closed the installer with it. The installer now stands on its own, and it asks before it closes anything.
Timefold makes the rack seventeen devices, Laura follows any tuning system beyond twelve notes, every oscillator gets coarse and fine transpose, macros take names, and nine measured sound fixes land with them.
Special thanks to Beatsbasteln for the detailed feedback. A good number of the fixes here, and the roomier oscillator card, came out of it, and a review is coming on his channel.
The rack's sixteenth device is an infinity engine. Five ways to make a sound climb, or sink, forever without ever getting anywhere, locked to your tempo so the build lands where your arrangement does. Plus five presets built around it and a NEW chip in the browser.
The entire effects section of Laura is now a plugin of its own, and if you own Laura it's already yours. Your license unlocks it, and this update installs it alongside the synth. Plus cleaner value typography on every knob.
The fractal oscillators learned to find the edge of the set and stay on it, a chaos attractor joined the modulators, the LFOs can now drive each other, and Laura installs as a CLAP plugin alongside AU and VST3. Plus ten psytrance presets and a stack of small fixes.
Two things. Laura tunes to any concert pitch now, so the 442 and 432 crowds get their reference, and the whole interface got a redesign: frosted glass panels floating over a living backdrop that carries its own motif for each theme. Your patches, packs, and license carry over exactly as before.
A polish pass on the controls that move. Sweeping a wavetable, navigating the fractal, riding a modulated volume or reverb tone, or turning a delay time all glide cleanly now, with the last small clicks and zippers taken out. Your patches, packs, and license carry over exactly as before.
Spores closes the loop between the sequencer and the Mycelium field. Every step that fires feeds a little into the field at its spot on the shape, and steps you set to FIELD+ or FIELD- play only where the field has grown or gone quiet. So the pattern feeds its own field, and the field decides which steps play. Two presets, Overgrowth and Spore Clock, are built on the loop, with a round of fixes underneath.
A small follow-up to the last two rounds, all about the quiet edges. Comparing patches with A/B or DICE now fades instead of jumping, a few live moves that used to step now glide, and switching oscillator waves always takes.
Another round of under-the-hood fixes. Stacking a lot of notes no longer risks a faint click when Laura reassigns a voice, a held pitch bend stays put through a legato line, and the effects hold steady whatever your sample rate and buffer size.
A small round of fixes straight from player feedback. Preset switches fade now instead of cutting, the low end stays clean when you pile up rich chords down low, and Laura holds more notes at once so big sustained chords ring out.
Laura already came with four themes. Now there's a fifth you colour yourself: pick four accents and the whole interface recolours to match as you choose them. Around it, a pass over the interface that tidies the menus, the FX rack, the preset browser, and a dozen small things.
Two new things. Murmuration is a multitap delay built on a flock of starlings: each echo is a bird, a note with an attack scatters the flock, and it wheels back into a swarm. And the sequencer gets an arpeggiator mode, where the keys you hold turn into a tempo-synced pattern, with a generative Drift order that wanders through the chord on its own.
Two big things. Mycelium is a living field that sits behind the synth: every note feeds it, every note reads it, and because one note's chemistry spreads into where another note is reading, the voices in a chord start to colour each other with nothing routed between them. And Laura now reads MPE controllers per note, so pitch, pressure, and slide each belong to the note you played them on, on any polyphonic patch.
Two things this round, and neither one touches how Laura sounds. Laura updates itself in one click now, straight from the banner, instead of sending you to the browser for a zip. The interface also got a round of small fixes: live values on the knobs while you drag, more tooltips, clearer hints, and a reduce-motion switch.
The biggest modulation update since launch. Four LFOs instead of two, a third envelope, and a sixteen-slot mod matrix you can fill by dragging a source straight onto any knob, with every routing colour matched to its source. Plus a key-gated sequencer, a faster preset browser with favourites, and a new preset pack system that opens with Substation, a free techno pack of 27 club-ready patches.
The v1.1.4 macOS build would not open on Intel Macs, or on any Mac that was not running the newest macOS. If Laura 1.1.4 failed to launch as a plugin or as the standalone app, this is why, and 1.1.5 fixes it. v1.1.5 ships a universal macOS build that runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon, back to macOS High Sierra. Windows was not affected.
The biggest release since v1.1.0. Two new sequencer modes (Galaxy and Constellation) with bouncing-ball physics, wormhole portals, and per-ball mod routing. A signed and notarized .pkg installer plus a Standalone app. A click-free voice path on cold notes, mono retrigger, and legato. Pluginval at strictness 10 across the full sample-rate and block-size matrix. All 271 factory presets normalised to -18 LUFS-I.
QA caught a Windows-only race in v1.1.1 that froze the fractal and classic oscillator waveforms when knobs moved. Diagnosed overnight and patched the next day before it reached users in the wild. v1.1.2 is rolling out via the in-app update check.
Three features that had been work in progress for months all land in v1.1.0. A proper character compressor with Bloom, Drift, Pump, and Spectral sections. A sequencer redesign with per-step mod lanes, conditional triggers, fractal nodes, and per-node target overrides. And a full-bleed preset browser with search, tags, and categories.
Two long standing audio issues fixed. Fresh plugin instances no longer distort with the default oscillator mix, and consecutive notes on mono patches like Sub Anchor no longer click on every retrigger.
The fractal sampling point can now follow a path through the complex plane instead of sitting on a fixed centre. Line, Ellipse, Lissajous, or a freehand drawn path. The timbre evolves on its own, no modulator routing required.
Fast FM into fractal or classic carriers now band-limits properly, the FM depth lerps across audio blocks instead of stepping, and the macOS installer writes to /Library so every user account on the Mac sees Laura.
Every modulator slot in Laura can now flip to a multi segment user drawn curve. Per segment tension, step nodes, loop and sustain markers, tempo sync, and a dedicated Mod Shape editor card.
A round of fixes across the Filter+ section. The Soft drive knob actually responds now, the loud drive modes stay loud as you push them, and every filter type swap fades in cleanly instead of clicking.
A new signature filter type called Synapse, a Sing knob that makes the resonance bloom into a vocal harmonic ring, and a richer Filter+ panel with a live response curve.
Laura's main filter section grows teeth: six pre-filter drive characters, a series highpass, and three new modulators wired straight to the cutoff.
New app icon, refreshed hero screenshots, and a handful of small UI corrections that add up to a calmer plugin window.
A no-license demo is now downloadable straight from the site, and the license revocation feed is signed end-to-end including refunds.