Monday, September 7, 2015

i've pointed out here a few times that my soundcards have been behaving poorly, and that i've isolated it, only to realize i hadn't.

i'm not sure what happened near the end of june, but it seems to have undone things in a way that i wasn't fully aware of. i'm running a very stripped down version of xp on my recording pc that cuts a large amount of the operating system out. in the process of trying to fix the problem, i seem to have put in place problems related to the windows xp sound mixer, which is known to be not very good for audio processing due to the way that it interferes with audio streaming. i think my initial script had broken the kmixer, and i had reinstalled it in an attempt to fix the problem, which created a whole other slew of problems.

i think i've fixed it in a two step process:

1) lock all sample rate conversion in the drivers.
2) delete the streaming drivers (mskssrv, mspclock, mspqm), which seem to be involved in conversion.

my initial script had deleted the streaming drivers, but not locked the sample rate. the result was that if i deleted the streaming drivers, i'd end up with fading because something was moving back and forth in the drivers. but, if i left the drivers in place, i'd get bad results from the windows conversion process.

locking the audio drivers without deleting the streaming drivers resulted in the files playing at the wrong speed, which seems to have been a consequence of an incomplete conversion process. but deleting the streaming drivers with the audio drivers locked in place seems to have resolved the issue.

i'm still testing, but i think i've got it figured out.

in the meantime, the alter-reality has caught up with me, and is now entering the synth-pop phase of my musical career (which was all of 1998 and early 1999). the catalyst was a four-track recorded that i got for christmas at the end of 1997. it's january 8th in the alter-reality; my first completed, uploaded track is dated to january 9th and will be featured tonight at midnight.

the featured tracks will now begin to change more frequently, which means i'll be posting more influences. there will not be any more lengthy pauses in this process for several years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-_rMcOPD0&t=15m50s