Highlights
- A part that should ring out no longer collapses to one note. With a long release, tails from earlier notes were quietly being restarted every time the same pitch came round again, so they never finished and never gave their voice back. The meter read twenty four of twenty four while you could hear one. A release now takes exactly as long as the knob says, measured from the moment you let that note go.
- Transposing an oscillator moves in steps of your scale. Under a tuning master, dropping an oscillator twelve steps in a sixteen tone scale used to give you a plain octave, because the transpose was worked out before the scale was ever consulted. It asks the scale what a step is worth now. Cents are still cents, in any tuning.
- Path Retrig does what it says on a synced division. Locking the fractal path to the bar meant a note could no longer reset it, because the bar rewrote the position before the note got a chance. They are separate things now: the division sets the speed, the note sets where the orbit starts.
- The fractal path goes slower still. Eight bars and sixteen bars, on top of the two and four that arrived last week. A sixteen bar orbit at 120 takes half a minute to come round.
- Laura FX moves to 1.6.2 alongside Laura and is otherwise unchanged. Everything here is on the synth side.
- Your patches, packs and license carry over exactly as before.
Details
Three of these came from Beatsbasteln, who has been writing microtonal parts with Laura since the tuning support landed and keeps finding the places where I only half finished the job.
The voice one is the fix I would rather have found myself. Last week's release repaired an envelope that cut its own tails short whenever you touched a knob, and what that had been hiding is that the tails were not finishing on their own either. A note off does not go to one voice. It goes to every voice still holding that note, and a tail from four bars ago is still holding it. So a looping part comes back round to the same pitch and quietly restarts the release of everything it has already released. Restart a ten second fade halfway through and you have ten seconds left again, from a quieter starting point. Restart that halfway through and you have ten again, quieter still. It halves and halves and never arrives at zero, so the voice never lets go of its slot. Fill all twenty four slots with remnants too faint to hear and every new note has to take one off something, which is why a wash of overlapping releases turned into what sounded like a single voice while the meter insisted every voice was busy. The old envelope had been killing those remnants by accident, as a side effect of the bug I fixed last week. Repairing one uncovered the other, which is the usual way of it.
The transpose one is a small mistake with a loud symptom. Laura has exactly one place where a note number becomes a frequency, and under a tuning master that place asks the master. The per oscillator transpose was not going through it. It multiplied the pitch by a twelve tone semitone before the scale got a look in, which is invisible in twelve tone, where a step and a semitone are the same thing. In a sixteen tone scale a twelve step drop is three quarters of an octave, and what you heard underneath your note was a flat octave that had nothing to do with the tuning you were working in. His advice was to read the tuning table last, after the note number and the knob positions have been gathered together, which is exactly right and is now what happens.
If you own Laura this is a free update, as every update is. Your patches, packs and license are untouched.