it's stable with the mixer, the h20 drivers, the dongle and the guitar synth - on a full boot. i'll try the m-audio drivers in a few hours...

gah. no. the creative emu blew it up again. but then it fixed itself when i turned it off rather than restarted. has that been it the whole time? i'll wait until i wake up.

it didn't like it when the soundblaster drivers set themselves as the default device, which seemed to load something in the background that nulled the drivers. setting the default device to the mixer resolved it. i would normally have the default device set to the m-audio card. i'll have to see what happens when i get there. but the next thing to turn back on is the guitar synth drivers.

i'm stable with the dongle. it's obvious to hear when it does click. am i stable with the soundblaster?

i've been saying for a while that connecting to the internet has been changing the tone, and that sometimes it seems like the bandwidth is cut.

i've deleted the firewire network port. and, in fact, i remember doing this once before. it's made an immediate difference in terms of opening the sound back up and making it sound less compressed. loading the tcp/ip layer may have been interfering with the stream some way or another.

before i did that, i cleaned the thing right out - deleted all the sound related drivers, wiped the registry, removed any executables. when i got the drivers back on, i had to flash the firmware again. this is something you don't want to do all of the time, as it's kind of dangerous; if there's a power outage, or just a fail, the device gets bricked. but, it's the only thing that is consistently getting me back to square one.

i then loaded the h20 drivers and it seems stable without the dongle running. but i'll have to give it another hour to see what happens.

all three wmi services are on the reinstall, along with wia. that would have to be it. in fact, the script tries to delete the wbem folder, but it gets an access denied because wmi is running.

i'm not going to rip it out, yet, i'm just going to turn it off and see what happens.

wmi is mostly useful for network admins. it's one of those face-palm microsoft moments, where they integrated driver software into network monitoring software. why, bill? why do you do these things? normal users don't want the network admin aspect of wmi, which is why i originally removed it. like, literally. you do NOT want that shit on your machine. but, it was built in such a way that certain hardware support requires it. it's a strong argument for linux.

....which i haven't moved to, btw, because i can't get drivers.

i'm reinstalling on a virtual machine to figure out where wmi even came from.

when i initially built the scripts, i had wmi disabled - deleted, in fact. i vaguely recall bringing it back in when i rebuilt the machine, probably because i meant to get a scanner, which i did, which i need to run in a virtual machine, anyways.

at this point, i can't think of a single reason why it should be installed in the first place.

with wmi driver extensions on: fail.

the wmi driver extension is just error logging...

i'm going to try and reinstall with it on. and then reinstall with it deleted, and delete it after. it makes more sense to me to think it's interfering than that it's required. but we'll find out.

this is still fading, but not nearly as badly. fail.

i'm going to try with the wmi driver extensions turned on. then do the reinstall with it on, & etc.

this is a mild enough fade that i may have not noticed it before. but it's there.

it's becoming clear that i may have to re-upload some material from last year. i've known since the start that the files sound slightly different on the laptop, but i just assumed it was because it's a laptop.