the closer it gets, the further it remains...

but, i've found a workaround. the problem is now solved. i will be cleaning up this morning and back at it tomorrow, after groceries.

i've been operating under the assumption that there's a solution. the truth is that i can't state with any certainty that all of it ever sounded right through foobar at the same time. i was always mixing through cubase. there were always subtle differences. when i get one track to sound better through the kmixer, another sounds worse.

it kind of struck me this morning that even if i can get an ideal answer, it's not worth any more time - because this is just a playback issue. playback is very important, of course, for sequencing - and for what i'm doing right now. but, i've kind of spun myself around in a hole - i'm fixing the playback to get on to the task at hand, but it's only the task at hand because it was broken in the first place.

so, what i've done instead is upgrade foobar so that i can use the asio plugin. playback is now over asio, completely bypassing the kmixer and any resampling it was doing.

again: it's not that the results were terrible across the board. i kept saying it felt like i was close, but it was just not quite right. some of the tracks were sounding absolutely perfectly - others were sounding flat. fixing the buffer size, or unlocking the sampling rate on the device, or 100 other things would fix one song and break another. and, so i just can't be certain there is an across the board answer. and am really leaning to the idea that there isn't. that is, if i want the tracks to sound as they were mixed, i may have to switch buffer sizes mid-record, or some other crazy thing. i may be partly at fault for not standardizing things, but as i mentioned in the last post, it shouldn't be happening anyways; i think i'm trying to create something that never existed, and am exposing the flows in the windows sound architecture in the process.

moving to asio just throws the whole problem out the window. i get everything i want. it's technically superior, even. and, i can move on.

i can state for certain that i did move buffer sizes around from song to song on playback through foobar, because i had to to get the sound right. given that truth, i probably shouldn't have expected a stable set-up in the first place. that is, the culmination of the last year of work has created a playback mess over that system.

but it's done now...