Highlights
- A drawn envelope plays its release. Put a sustain marker on an MSEG and everything you drew after it was ignored on note off; the voice faded out in a fixed fifty milliseconds instead. It now runs from the marker to the last point at the speed the curve says, and only the short click free tail remains for a curve that ends above zero.
- An MSEG loop whose end marker sits on the last point loops. It used to restart the whole cycle from the start in LFO mode, ignoring the loop start, and freeze at the final value in envelope mode.
- The sustain pedal works with an MPE controller. The pedal arrives on the master channel and the notes live on member channels, so it never reached them. It reaches all of them now, sostenuto too.
- A mono voice can't get stuck by a pedal lift. Lifting the pedal and pressing the next key within the same few milliseconds left the new note droning until the next key press.
- Two fingers on the same pitch on an MPE controller are two notes in Mono and Legato. Lifting one no longer releases the other.
- Mono and Legato leave Galaxy and Constellation balls alone. A key press used to take over the first ball's voice, and the key release silenced that ball for good.
- When every voice is busy, the oldest released tail is the one taken, not whichever sat first in the list. Past the limit in a dense passage you heard the note you'd just let go of get cut while stale tails rang on.
- Macros, the chaos attractor, the sequencer playhead, ball physics, the Mycelium field, LFO depth, the four filter amount knobs and the Spectral Blend morph all ramp instead of stepping. A macro on cutoff used to zipper, a playhead wrap or a ball impact was a click, and the ENV 2 and Filter+ power buttons thumped.
- Moving unison Spread or Detune under a held note no longer clicks.
- The Attack knob goes all the way down. Every note was fading in over at least eight milliseconds whatever the knob said, thirty on a low note with the sub on. A one millisecond pluck is a one millisecond pluck now, unless the spectral section is on, where the eight milliseconds still cover its startup.
- Smaller ones: a one shot LFO with Retrigger off fires on every note rather than once per voice; a note played on the master channel bends by the master range, not the member range; lifting a key while the arpeggiator is sounding that pitch no longer clips its hit; the Sustain knob glides under a held note instead of stepping.
- Your patches, packs and license carry over exactly as before. Laura FX moves to 1.7.0 alongside Laura and is otherwise unchanged.
Details
This started with a report of clicks when dragging across the keyboard on the Init patch. I wrote a harness that drags across two octaves through exactly the path the on screen keyboard uses and scans every key change, then recorded the real app doing the same thing. The drag was clean. What was clicking was Init's own oscillator, one narrow impulse per cycle, and a drag stacks a dozen release tails of it at unrelated pitches into an irregular click train. Not a bug, but it made me go through the whole voice engine looking for the ones that were.
The MSEG one bothers me most. The code that runs the curve after note off exists, and a comment two functions away says the tail is meant to play out, but note off started a fixed fifty millisecond fade first and that fade took precedence over everything. If you'd drawn a long release and wondered why the envelope ignored it, that's why.
The rest of the list is smoothing. Laura ramps knob movements before they reach the filter, and it ramped Volume and Pan modulation, but the newer modulation sources, macros, chaos, the playhead, the balls, the field, went straight in at the block rate. A macro on cutoff zippered and a playhead wrap was a click. They all pass through a five millisecond ramp now, and the four filter amount knobs through a ten millisecond one, which is also what stops the section power buttons from thumping.
Every fix has a test that fails on the old code, sixteen of them, and the older harnesses still pass. If you own Laura this is a free update, as every update is. Your patches, packs and license are untouched.