Highlights
- New Path control per oscillator slot: Off, Line, Ellipse, Lissajous, or a freehand path drawn in a 2D editor.
- Speed and Size knobs plus a Rate combo for host tempo sync (Free, 1/1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/8T, 1/16T). A live Hz readout sits next to the Rate combo when in Free mode.
- Smoothness knob caps how often the wavetable is rebuilt: higher Smoothness is chunkier and cheaper, lower is finer and uses more CPU.
- Retrigger pill resets the path phase on every note-on.
- Auto target: Mandelbrot, Burning Ship, Tricorn, and Multibrot animate the centre. Julia animates the seed.
- FractalNavigator now overlays the live orbit and a moving playhead, so you can see what you hear.
- Three new factory presets: Cusp Walker (PAD, deep zoom into a satellite mini-Mandelbrot), Basin Crosser (LEAD, Julia seed orbiting a Lissajous wide enough to leave the bounded set), and Path Pulser (SEQ, sequencer-driven minor-pentatonic earworm with evolving timbre between repeats).
Details
Laura's fractal source has always taken a static complex c. v1.0.8 lets you replace that point with a path that orbits, sweeps, or freehand traces through the complex plane. The result is an evolving timbre you don't have to wire a single modulator for. The path is the patch.
Pick a shape from the Path combo on the OSC card. Line is a back and forth along one axis. Ellipse is a smooth circular orbit. Lissajous is a 2:3 figure family with a quarter-phase Y offset. Drawn opens a 2D breakpoint editor where you place control points in the unit square; the editor renders the same centripetal Catmull-Rom curve the audio reads, so what you see is what the audio traces.
Speed and Size set how fast the path moves and how large the orbit. Smoothness is the throttle: it caps how often the audio publishes a new wavetable. Higher Smoothness commits less often and uses less CPU at the cost of a chunkier timbre update cadence; lower Smoothness commits more often and gives finer motion. The throttle is also adaptive to Speed so a very slow path doesn't generate dozens of redundant rebuilds per orbit.
The Rate combo flips Speed between free Hz and host tempo synced cycle lengths from 1/32 to 1/1, with triplet flavours. A live Hz readout next to the combo shows the current value when in Free mode. The Retrigger pill resets the path phase to zero on every note-on so each note can start fresh.
Three new factory presets ship with the feature. Cusp Walker (PAD) sits deep inside a satellite mini-Mandelbrot at zoom 20.6 and walks the orbit through dense filigree, so each pass of a long note tail finds a slightly different timbre. Basin Crosser (LEAD) animates the Julia seed on a Lissajous wide enough to leave the bounded set briefly each cycle; those silences are the basin crossings showing up as rhythm. Path Pulser (SEQ) pairs the geometric sequencer's minor-pentatonic ping-pong with a slow elliptical path so the loop's timbre never quite repeats.