it turns out that directsound is just a layer on wdm since 2000. weird. can't explain this, but it's clear...

so, the reason it sounded correctly through smplayer and poorly through foobar is that i was accessing devices in smplayer through the directsound interface and devices in foobar through the wdm interface. there is a workaround to this: i can set the device to default and then set foobar to the primary sound driver. this gets around the wdm kmixer and doesn't merely sound clean but sounds far superior..

kmixer is known to be crappy in certain circumstances, but what i'm experiencing over and over is far worse than anything i was experiencing previously.

i need to play with some things still, but it's now clear - seriously this time - that it's a windows/wdm thing. i just don't know if i can fix this, or if i should be working around it.

see, now it seems like it's fading through foobar and not fading through smplayer.

i'm falling asleep...

i'll have time when i wake up, before the appointment.

but, i ended up breaking it to the point where i had to do a last known good, which brought me back to a point where i'd might as well reinstall. one more time. shit to do tomorrow. back at it soon.

so, i was getting funky results out of the other players after all - it's not just a foobar issue.

the soundblaster actually stayed consistent out of the box for quite a while, until i broke the sound. it came back a little after a few things, but it's really the cleanest sound. and, i think i got the m-audio card stable through nothing more complicated than uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, which is ridiculous - because i just installed them. but, that was after a number of over things...

i think i want to avoid breaking the system, because the soundblaster never really came back.

i've been noticing since day one that the m-audio card seems to perform better when a suite of system devices are running: the audio echo canceller and the kernel splitter, especially. the issue seems to have something to do with this. but it's completely inconsistent. sometimes, it drops out as soon as those devices do. sometimes, it sounds fine without them even turning on.

the only way to consistently turn these devices on is through cubase.

so, i'm coming to what is an endpoint. if everything is working except that card? i'm better off ignoring the card. i'll just disable it. and, so, i'll be back to work soon.

my goal today is to figure this out, finally, so i can get back to work on wednesday.

no, it's the same weird shit. grargh. well, at least it's clear, now.

if i open foobar on the laptop while there is no open stream in youtube, i get exactly the same blunted sound i'm getting on the recording pc. but, if i open it while there is an open stream (or i open a stream while it's open), it snaps back to the right sound.

so, it's like it can't load the drivers right, but if something else loads the drivers for it then it knows what to do.

keep in mind that this is subtle. i previously just thought it was inherent hardware differences.

deleting replaygain seems to have helped.

yeah. wow.

my baseline was screwed. lol.

yeah.

i'm noticing that this track, which is the one i'm using for testing, sounds better through youtube (with the obvious caveats of compression) than it does through foobar - on the *laptop*.

there's something funny with foobar on both machines.

which means my metric necessarily requires some shifting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGbKDq95-Ro

i got most of my end-of-month errands done today (i'll have to do laundry tomorrow), and i've been lost in ranting on election articles in between it. i'm not sure i'll get much done with the rest of the day, but i did get the machine fully installed and it does seem like i'm getting clean signals from the two pci cards out of smplayer and winamp. i'm going to make sure i do solid testing before i even open foobar, to be absolutely certain it's the source. but, it's looking like it may just have been a triviality..

two months. ugh. at least i have five more years now, though.

it took me a few weeks to come to terms with the fact that i got the five years, but i'm also now completely done smoking. this is the necessary incentive. i set my september budget this afternoon, and it had zero for cigarettes - which means i should be able to finally build those shelves at the beginning of october with the money i save. i was waiting to see how it turned out because...what's the use in building shelves if i'm hitting the streets...but, five years is enough to get me comfortable down here, and maybe even lead to a change of mind if things turn awry when the next renewal comes up. i'm not going to pretend that i can predict what i'll be thinking by then. but i think i may be unlikely to want to move, at any cost.

i have one last appointment with the psychologist on tuesday. it was meant as a follow-up to see if the results came in and how i feel about it, which they have, and which i feel good about. but, i'm going to try and get him to fill out those student loan forms. the condition is supposed to be permanent disability. it's kind of shady. but, you'd think five years on odsp is enough to get the message across: this loan is merely going to generate interest indefinitely. i've decided that if i gets cleared and i somehow come into money, i will....i'm not going to give it to the state flat out. i'm going to donate it to a career services organization that helps young people determine what they want out of life before they go to school through objective skills testing. i think that's what the system is missing. i'm not talking about some kind of soviet-style forced study or something, i'm just talking about a little guidance that's able to put people through aptitude and psychological testing and able to provide suggestive results. there's obviously a problem. i don't think we need corporations to take over the education system. i just think we need to invest in guidance, and remove the taboo around it.

i'm also going to see if he'll just fill my prescription for five years. that would be the easiest answer. as far as i can tell, the doctor i saw in london has also shut his practice down. that's two doctors in a row that have shut down, and there's only one doctor here in windsor and he's a prick. at least these guys know me a little; it's a simple request, and i can't think of any good reason they'd deny it.

if that all happens as planned, i should have all this annoying calling around everywhere and getting forms filled out stuff completely out of the way for years into the future. and, that will be good.

so, it seems like i'll be good to go and back at it in a few days. hopefully, that works out.

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.

i think the error that a lot of these studies make is that they compare serious music before 1955 to folk music after 1955. there's certainly been a merging of the ideas starting with zappa and the beatles and pink floyd. but, i really don't think these differences come out if you do like comparisons: debussy to stockhausen or nirvana to ledbetter or bjork to billie holiday or one direction to traditional nursery rhymes.

the only thing i'd pull out as probably being substantially different is that you previously wouldn't expect people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s to experience the kind of arrested development they experience today. they would have grown out of the nursery rhymes, not latch on to successive ones until they're grandparents. so, the real issue is the juvenilization of society.

www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop-music-has-actually-gotten-worse-8173368/?no-ist

dammit, i got it. finally. and then it disappeared.

it's hard to know what is exactly the right set up, because i'm dealing with relatively subtle shifts. there's been a few times where's it's not been clear. but, when it is clear, it's crystal clear.

i broke everything, to the point that i had to install the m-audio card to get the audio subsystem back up. i then restarted the computer with the plug and play service disabled, then turned it on when the computer came up. there was about four minutes of beautiful clarity. and, then something turned on and it clicked back out.

i didn't have process explorer open. when i tried to recreate the scenario, i couldn't. which suggests to me that whatever it was that clicked in wrote something to the registry, and i'll have to rebreak it again to get back to where it was.

i think that points to the wmi as the most likely culprit.

i'm still testing. but that's the closest i've been yet. something is loading on startup in windows that's doing this.

i'm testing on a system that doesn't have my script implemented because i want to isolate what the fuck. but it may be the case that such a process would have a different result on a fully installed system because whatever's clicking in may not be able to reinstall itself.

again: i vaguely remember playing with this before.

actually, you know what i can do is turn the boot log on and isolate one by one...

nope. came back. i'm going to have to start breaking more stuff, i guess. plug & play, maybe.

it's just this cut at the high end...like a low pass...

ok, so it seems like i'm making good progress on the bust-it-and-reconstruct-it approach. and, i have a vague memory of doing this about a year ago. these vague memories. sometimes, it would be nice if life had a rewind feature so i could go back and see.

i'm on the brink of convincing myself this is stable and good. next step will be seeing what happens when i get the m-audio drivers in. i just need to let the ram clear and do a fresh start-up...

thoughts on the latest spencer krug recording

i've listened to a few tracks off this record, and i'll admit that i grasp why a pop audience would react positively to it - it sounds fancy. i'm not being an ass on purpose (although i probably couldn't prevent myself), but it's the basic idea. it gives you the opportunity to put down the garbage you normally listen to and feel sophisticated and upper class for an hour. and, maybe it might act as somewhat of a gateway.

but, it's just so terribly contrived. the cadences. the crescendos. it's blatant cliche, and clearly consciously designed to maximize itself as such. and, on top of that, he plays the instrument like a blunt poke in the eye - most of the record sounds like a player piano. not a sequencer. you can program dynamics into a sequencer. this is just straight artillery fire.

the guy has demonstrated potential. and his refusal to do what he's expected is definitely refreshing. but, i'm sorry to say that this is some of the deadest piano music that i've heard.

thoughts on the new pinkish black single

the last one took a bit to click, but it eventually did, and this is likewise a bit disorienting. you have to give this band full marks for a subtle evolution. but it comes with the caveat that they're getting harder to follow because they seem to be getting poppier and poppier.

this is moving slowly into something like spencer krug territory.

(that one record he did, organ music - not vibraphone music like i hoped, is actually uncharacteristically interesting. it's a saturated space, with a lot of mediocrity, but nothing hits you in the gut like a good, dark, smart synth pop song.)