Highlights
- Updating Laura is one click now. The new-version banner opens a panel inside the plugin, shows you what changed, downloads the build, checks it's intact, and launches the signed installer for you. No more hunting down a zip in your browser.
- Knobs show their value while you drag. Handy when you want an exact number on a rate or a cutoff instead of eyeballing it. The readout fades out when you let go.
- Drag a modulation source onto a knob and the knob previews the source name before you drop it, so you can see where the routing's about to land.
- A reduce-motion switch in the gear menu. Turn it on and every animation snaps straight to its end state. The setting sticks between sessions.
- The preset browser now tells you when a filter combination matches nothing, and gives you one click to clear the filters and get the full list back.
- More tooltips and clearer gesture hints where people kept asking for them: the filter, the second and third envelopes, the MSEG tabs, the sequencer ball controls, and the FX rack.
- Smaller fixes too. The FX rack reorder handle brightens when you hover it, and the macro, LFO, and envelope badges center their labels so short names sit straight.
Details
This one stays out of the audio path. Two things: Laura updates itself in one click now, and the interface got a round of small fixes I'd been putting off.
Until now, when a new build was out, the banner in the corner sent you to your browser to grab a zip and install it by hand. It worked, but it felt like a chore, so people skipped it. Now the banner opens a panel inside Laura. It shows you what changed, downloads the new build, checks the download is intact before it touches anything, and launches the signed installer for you. You okay the one system prompt and restart your DAW, or quit and reopen the standalone, and you're on the new version. If a step fails, say your connection drops or something doesn't check out, it hands you a plain download link so you're never stuck. One thing I want to be straight about: a plugin can't replace its own files while your DAW is holding it open, so the update still runs through the same signed and notarized installer you'd have downloaded yourself. Laura just fetches it and runs it for you, which was the annoying part.
The rest is interface work. Knobs now show their value while you drag, which sounds minor until you're trying to set an exact rate or cutoff and don't want to guess. Dragging a modulation source onto a knob previews the source name on the knob before you let go, so you can see where the routing will land. I added tooltips where I kept getting the same question: the filter, the second and third envelopes, the envelope source picker, the MSEG tabs. The sequencer hint bar now spells out the scroll and Shift and Alt gestures instead of assuming you already know them. The preset browser says so when a filter combination has no matches and gives you one click to clear it. And there's a reduce-motion switch in the gear menu for anyone who'd rather the interface sat still. Flip it and every animation jumps straight to where it was heading, and it remembers the setting.
None of this changes how Laura sounds. Your patches and license carry over untouched. There's no headline feature here, just a lot of small fixes that I notice every time I open the plugin.