Highlights
- Ocean Drive is a new theme. Hot pink and ocean teal over a deep indigo night, with sunset orange and a dusk violet on the sequencer. Behind the panels the sun sets into the sea, and two palms lean in from the edges and sway a little. Pick it from the cog menu. Laura FX follows whichever theme you choose in Laura.
- Each oscillator has an Octave control, up to four octaves either way. It sits first in the PITCH panel, ahead of Coarse and Fine, and the PITCH pill shows it, as in +1 oct. An octave there always doubles or halves the frequency, in any tuning.
- An open window costs about a third of what it did. With the standalone in front on Init and nothing playing, Laura used about 44% of one core on my M3 Pro. Now it's about 15%. Minimised, it went from about 24% to under 4%.
- The graphics layer under the window used to redraw the whole window on every screen refresh, 120 times a second on a ProMotion display, minimised or not, whether or not anything had changed. Now it only draws when something on screen changes.
- The four LFO previews in the top bar were the most expensive thing left in the window. They're drawn a different way now and cost a small fraction of what they did. The pixels match the old drawing to within 3 levels out of 255.
- When the window sits visible behind another app, the background pauses and now holds its last frame. Before, faint copies of the LFO curves could pile up behind the previews.
- Double-clicking the filter's Env amount sets it to 0, which turns the envelope off. It used to jump to +2 octaves. The same goes for Env->Cut in FILTER+ and the ENV 2 slider on the MOD page.
- The manual covers Octave and Ocean Drive, and three mistakes in it are fixed. A double-click on a knob resets it rather than opening numeric entry, the right-click menu never had copy and paste, and Fine moves a semitone either way, not a tone.
- Your patches, packs and license carry over. Old patches load with Octave at 0, so nothing changes until you turn it. Laura FX moves to 1.7.5 alongside Laura.
Details
Three things in this one. A new theme, a pitch control that makes microtonal work less fiddly, and the second half of the CPU work from 1.7.4.
Ocean Drive takes its colours from the GTA VI trailers, the pink sky going orange over the water with palms in silhouette. It's my own take on that look, and Rockstar has nothing to do with it. The backdrop is drawn live, like the other themes' backdrops, so the sun and the horizon sit in the gaps between the panels and the palms show through the glass. The palms took three attempts. The first ones looked like feathers.
Octave is for tunings that don't have twelve notes to the octave. Since 1.6.2, Coarse moves by steps of the loaded scale. That's right when you want to move a layer by scale degrees, but it means knowing how many steps make an octave in every tuning you use. In a 16 note scale, Coarse at -12 is three quarters of an octave. Octave skips the question. It multiplies the frequency by two for each step and never asks the scale. In ordinary twelve note tuning it does the same thing as Coarse at plus or minus 12.
In the 1.7.4 notes I said the graphics layer under the window still redrew everything on every screen refresh, and that this was most of what was left. That's the part fixed here. With nothing changing on screen the window draws nothing, and a minimised one draws nothing at all. The background swirl had its own surprise. On a 120 Hz display it drew 120 frames a second whatever the Fluid button said. Now it's 60 to 70 with Fluid on, and fewer with it off.
Measuring all this turned up something I didn't expect. The LFO previews cost more than the rest of the window put together, because of how the graphics layer turns a moving curve into pixels on Apple silicon. Each one cost about 3 ms, thirty times a second. They're now drawn as an image first and handed over in one piece.
I compared the new drawing with the old one pixel by pixel, and the plugin passes the same validation it did before. The CPU figures are from my M3 Pro with the standalone on Init and nothing playing, both versions measured back to back. If you own Laura this is a free update, as every update is.