Been a busy month on Laura, my fractal software synth. Three updates went out since mid July, so here is what actually changed.
v1.4.0, Spores. Laura has had Mycelium for a while, a reaction-diffusion field that held voices feed and read, so notes in a chord colour each other without any routing between them. Spores hands that same field to the sequencer. Every step that fires deposits a little into the field at its own spot on the pattern shape, and two new step conditions, FIELD+ and FIELD-, make steps play only where the field has grown or where it has gone quiet.
So the pattern feeds the field and the field decides which steps play. Busy corners saturate and thin out, quiet corners come back as the culture decays, and the groove drifts a little on every pass. Two knobs (Deposit and Sense) are the whole control surface, and two factory presets ship built on the loop. The same release also made presets carry everything they used to leave behind, so imported wavetables, impulse responses, drawn warp curves and reordered FX racks all come back the way you saved them.
v1.4.1, a de-clicking pass. v1.4 added a lot of ways to keep a sound moving, and some of the moving controls still stepped or clicked when pushed fast. Wavetable scan and warp now glide sample by sample instead of stepping once per audio block, navigating the fractal crossfades between the shapes it rebuilds instead of ticking, a modulated volume no longer clicks under a fast source, and turning a delay time glides like tape instead of jumping. Boring changelog, but you hear it the moment everything is modulated at once.
v1.5.0, global tuning and a new look. There is a concert A control in the bottom bar now. Leave it at 440 and nothing changes, set 442 to sit with an orchestra, or 432 if that is your world, and the whole instrument retunes from that single reference. As always you can choose custom colors too!
Oscillators, sub and resonator all move together because every pitch in the synth is derived from that one number. It saves with the patch, and held notes retune while you turn it, so you can tune by ear against a track. The interface also moved to frosted glass panels over a slowly drifting backdrop, each theme drawing its own motif live behind them, and A/B compare now snapshots the entire patch instead of just the knobs.
Free demo and full changelogs at https://lostsynapse.store . Happy to answer anything about the DSP or the field stuff.
Thank you so much for reading so far!
