well, this is embarrassing.

both smplayer and winamp seem to be functioning just fine. it's a problem in foobar.

that really should have been a very early troubleshooting step. i guess when i realized that the clock was screwing with the asio output, my head get locked into something under the hood. and, it may be that there's two problems here, not one. but that's still something i should have ruled out early.

i'm going to get the whole thing set up properly and test again. if it works out, i'm left concluding that foobar is foobared.

my best guess is that i'm transferring something over from a past install and it's just a question of reinstalling the program.

but, then again: winamp is ancient. and does smplayer (a linux port) use kmixer?

hey, if it's a workaround i'll take it...

i'm mixing in asio, mostly. through cubase. i just need a playback strategy. if foobar is foobared because of windows (see, i know i could often hear a difference, but i can't quantify this - and it seems much worse now than it ever did before), and smplayer gets around it, then great.

i also need to point out that the alter-reality is on the verge of finally shifting entirely into the synth-pop phase. i was hoping to have the reconstructions that i'm doing complete by the time i got here, but the bloody machine won't co-operate. i can't put the alter-reality on pause, it needs to keep flowing. and, in some way, this is an addendum to the process. but, the posting cycle is going to be a little unclear until i determine exactly what i'm using to promote the exact releases.

but, this is the primary release that the alter-reality will be exploring over the next six months, starting a few days into september. the disc is split into songs and experiments. the bulk of the songs (5 of 8) were recreated from the demos that the alter-reality has already gone through, but they have been updated to include synthesizers, drum machines and other types of electronic noise - they are very different from their initial incarnations as noise-punk demos, although it still comes off as relatively lo-fi due to the fact that i only saved the material in low quality mp3 files (112-128 kbps), although i've cleaned it up quite a bit and the fidelity is really no longer poor. some of the experiments were retroactively constructed into inrisampled, but they were almost all initially constructed originally for this disc.

i've seen traffic go down a lot over the last couple of months, as the alter-reality has run through a pause that corresponded to a period where i did not have recording equipment available to me. as this shifts out and back into an active phase, i'll be more actively promoting the material again, and will hopefully see a corresponding return of traffic.

that said, the audience for the synth-pop period would necessarily be rather different than the audience for the noise-punk period. and, all i can say about that is that i'm curious as to what happens.

the alter-reality is currently just after christmas, 1997. the release date for this record is june 20, 1998. so, this will be a process of promoting songs intended for this record as they were completed, until i get there some time early next year.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-3

this may turn out to be a lot more trivial than i thought.

i've started from the absolute beginning: i'm not even installing chipset or video card drivers. the soundblaster drivers are on the install disc.

when it first comes up, before installing anything further at all whatsoever, it's a little trebly sounding. i recognize this as the way it sounds when it's broken. a reboot brings back the same cut highs i've been fighting with for weeks.

first, i tried to break the plug & play and this did work - until i re-opened foobar. what? how? so, i deleted the config file in foobar. it went back to a clean sound - until i re-opened it again.

this is the only thing i've found, up to this point, that consistently creates and recreates the issue. could it just be a corrupt setting in the foobar configuration file? could it be that easy?

see, here's the thing: essentially everything i've done up to this point forces me to reset the driver in foobar. breaking the plug & play, reinstalling the drivers, etc all has the step of repointing foobar to the right driver. meaning i'm always resetting the configurations.

what's interesting to me is that this is basically the same type of error that i'm getting in cubase: something is saving incorrectly, or loading incorrectly on the save. could there be an underlying issue at the root of both? if so, it's not ram, because i got it on the other machine, too.

i'm going to slowly continue the reinstall and see if this remains constant.

the only thing i can think of is that when i installed the vanilla xp on the pentium III, it was a version that had been slipstreamed up to the end of the product cycle. i guess that takes me back to the idea that i need to remove something from the xp install - that an update has broken something fairly central. if i get to the end of the install process and am face-to-face with something as trivial as this, i'll have to start from scratch with my sp1 disc and slowly move forwards, service pack by service pack, until i get to the problem.