Highlights
- Undo takes back one thing. Cmd+Z used to revert every knob you had moved since the last preset load, because all of it counted as a single step. Each control interaction is its own step now, so undo walks back through your edits the way you made them.
- You can listen through the preset browser. Click a row, or arrow down the list, and the patch loads with the browser still open. Return keeps it. Escape puts your own patch back exactly as it was, name and number and the unsaved marker included.
- Mute and shape one routing at a time. All sixteen matrix slots and every routing you dragged get a mute button and a response curve, linear or exponential or logarithmic or S shaped. Muting sends zero depth and keeps the number you dialled in, so you can take a routing out of the sound and put it straight back.
- There is a question mark in the footer. It opens the manual, lists the keyboard shortcuts, replays the welcome card, and copies your setup details if you need to send me a mail. Nothing in the plugin linked to the manual before, which is an odd thing to notice only after writing nineteen chapters of one.
- Right click the dice to roll one part of the patch. Filter, envelopes, modulation, voice, tone or effects, on their own. A full roll still parks your macros; a scoped one leaves them alone.
- Your host sees the parameters in groups. Around 290 of them, sorted into sections instead of arriving as one flat list, and the modulation slots read as Mod 3 Depth rather than something only I could parse.
- Demo mode can save presets. The watermark is the enforcement, so if you spend an evening designing sounds on the demo you keep the sounds.
- Fixed: a long release could vanish the instant you touched an envelope knob. The release slope was worked out from the Sustain level instead of from wherever the note actually let go, so with Sustain at zero every ringing tail was cut to silence on the spot, and with Sustain up the tail ran long or short by the difference. Turning Release up while a chord rings now lengthens the chord that is ringing.
- Fixed: tempo synced modulation ran at the right speed in the wrong place. The fractal path and the four LFOs counted their own way round the cycle rather than reading the song position, so stopping and restarting playback left them offset from the bar, and the same bar came back sounding different every pass.
- The fractal path can crawl. Two bars and four bars, alongside the divisions it already had. Slow settings used to be starved of new positions, so a four bar orbit only moved once every quarter second. It gets eighty nine positions per orbit now instead of twenty five, which is the whole point of running it slow.
- Laura FX moves to 1.6.1 alongside Laura and is otherwise unchanged. Everything in this one is on the synth side.
- Your patches, packs and license carry over exactly as before.
Details
Most of this release came from looking for friction rather than bugs. The feature surface is already dense and I know where everything is, which is exactly the problem: the things that get in a new user's way are the things my hands have stopped noticing. Undo was the clearest case. Laura had an undo history the whole time, and it had never once been useful, because nothing closed a step. Every knob you moved since the last preset load piled into the same one, so a single Cmd+Z threw away an hour of work, and the history could only grow, never shrink. It is now one step per control interaction, which is what everybody assumed it already was.
Preset auditioning is the other one I should have done a long time ago. Browsing 302 patches by loading each one and closing the window is not browsing, it is committing 302 times. Now selecting a row loads it in place with the browser still up, so you can arrow down the list and listen. Escape rolls the whole patch back to the snapshot taken when the browser opened, so auditioning cannot cost you the sound you were working on. That rollback took more care than the auditioning did, and closing the plugin window in the middle of an audition used to keep the auditioned preset and lose your own patch. It does not now.
The rest came from beatsbasteln, who took the fractal path modulation seriously enough to find something real in it. He said the voicing felt weird: discontinuities without the voices being anywhere near maxed out, a maxed Release that seemed to do nothing while he dragged it and then worked when he let go, and a part that sometimes collapsed to sounding almost monophonic even with all twenty four voices going. Three complaints, one cause. The envelope worked out its release slope from the Sustain level, on the assumption that a release always begins there. It does not. Let a note go partway down its decay and it begins wherever the decay had got to. With Sustain above zero the tail was re slewed to the wrong length, and I measured a two second release turning into 3.59 seconds just because an unrelated envelope knob was touched. With Sustain at zero the slope came out as zero, which the code read as "this stage is finished" and cut every ringing tail dead. That is the discontinuity, it is why dragging Release appeared to do nothing until you released the mouse, and it is why a chord of long tails collapsed to whatever note was being held. His own guess, that going straight from decay into release was the problem when the decay is long enough to skip sustain, was very close to it.
His other observation was that tempo synced modulation is not where it says it is. Restart playback and the fractal path was somewhere else. That one is embarrassing in a satisfying way, because the modulation was running at exactly the right speed the entire time. It was counting its own way round the cycle, which only agrees with the bar if it happened to start on one and nothing has moved the playhead since. Stop, rewind, play, and it was off by whatever the gap had been. In the test that reproduces his report the second pass used to land 0.107 of a cycle away from the first, and now it lands on the same number to six decimal places. The four LFOs had the same problem and got the same treatment. There is a longer piece about that one in the articles, because the reason it survives so long unnoticed is more interesting than the fix.
If you own Laura this is a free update, as every update is. Your patches, packs and license are untouched.