Highlights
- Every effect carries a symbol in its title bar. Delay draws its taps, Reverb its diffusion, Compressor its knee, Penrose its spiral, Timefold its step grid. Seventeen devices, seventeen marks, so a long chain is something you scan rather than read.
- The cards got a lighting pass. Light now falls from one place instead of being wiped evenly across the header, the recess behind the controls has a real edge to it, and the colour on the spine flares where it meets the name.
- Fixed: switching an effect off or on left bright rectangles over its controls, one for the title bar and one around every knob, and they only cleared once you scrolled the rack.
- Fixed: the power button on the paler effects looked like it had a rectangle drawn behind it. It never was an outline, it was a glow that did not fit in the space it had.
- The manual install folders now cover CLAP properly. It was in the download all along and the instructions never mentioned it, and on Windows the copy script left it behind.
- On Windows, removing Laura no longer takes Laura FX with it if you bought Laura FX on its own.
- Laura FX gets all of it, same day.
Details
This started as a complaint about the effect cards looking flat, which they did. The first attempt was to draw each effect's symbol large and faint behind its knobs, the way the graphics on a hardware panel sit under the controls. It looked like scratches. On Timefold it was worse than that, because the symbol is a step grid and it sat directly behind the actual step grid. So the drawings shrank and moved up into the title bar, where they have room of their own, and that turned out to be the better idea anyway: the title bar is exactly where you look when you are trying to find something in a chain.
Two of the fixes here are mine from the same afternoon, found because the visual work made them impossible to miss. The first was the power button, which had a glow behind it that was taller than the row it lived in, so what actually reached the screen was a circle with its top and bottom sliced off. On the saturated effects you would never notice. On Reverb and Resonance, which are nearly white, it read as a badly drawn outline.
The second was better hidden and had been there longer. Switching an effect off dimmed each of its controls one at a time, and dimming a control repaints that control on its own, without the card underneath it. The controls ended up drawn straight onto the panel behind the card rather than onto the card itself, which showed up as a bright rectangle in the shape of every knob and of the title bar. Scrolling made it go away, because scrolling forces the whole card to redraw, which is exactly the kind of symptom that makes something look like a display quirk rather than a bug. Switching an effect off is now one pass over the card instead of a dozen separate ones.
If you own Laura this is a free update, as every update is. Your patches, packs and license are untouched.