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.)

nope. soundblaster is doing the same damned thing with no further drivers installed.

it's a windows problem. i knew it was a windows problem from the start. and i can fix it for a bit, but it never sticks.

i need to get groceries. but, i'm going to have to start breaking some stuff when i wake up. it's gotta be installing broken.

it may be that i have to break everything immediately and then install it all on top of that.

*sigh*. that got me nowhere. it's back to the bleeding on the m-audio card.

i'm going to take a step back and test with the soundblaster on an m-audio non-install, because i don't think it's doing this. if i can convince myself of this, i'll try leap-frogging the m-audio install and testing directly with the mixer.

i don't actually use the m-audio card for recording. i put it in the system years ago as a playback card, meant for more living room type applications. if the setup is stable without it, it's not worth fighting with it - i'll just take it out.

on 800th thought, i'm getting the same outcome from the m-audio card on immediate install, without even turning the mixer on, suggesting the conflict is probably with the soundblaster. and, listening to some stuff i've done over the last year indicates it's definitely not the setup i've been using.

so, i'm back to checking things on and off, one at a time. at least i have a reduced set of options, this time.

yeah, this driver conflict is persistent. and, to be entirely honest, i don't really have the will to resolve it - i just want it to be stable so i can get back to actually making stuff.

hopefully the following plan is workable. i'll have to test it...

1) restrict the wdm to the m-audio card. that is, do not install the wdm drivers for the alesis device.
2) only use asio to interact with the alesis device.

i think that this will avoid conflicts. and, if i can determine that the outs are essentially interchangeable, it won't matter much.

after i've tested this a bit, i'm also going to see if i can find an asio media player. foobar ought to work, but i can't find an xp-period component.

both devices can connect over asio. i don't think there's a conflict over asio, it seems to be specifically in the kmixer. but i guess we'll see.

actually, i think i can answer that. it was fine until i reinstalled the mixer drivers, then the pci card went back to the same flat sound - and consistency remained across the cards. so, it's a driver conflict. but, then i fixed it by running the registry part of the driver install.

i'm spinning myself around in circles. if i leave the registry part of the driver install on, i get the clock fades. if i don't, i get a driver conflict. i'm going to have to hone in on that and just take out specific parts - probably just the clock driver.

mild levels of testing are still necessary, but i think this is it.

....and, then it clicked.

i'm getting the same dead tone out of both cards.

so, if i was mixing on the mixer, and i listened to it through the pci card, it would sound the same. and i'd never know.

so, out of desperation, i busted the wdm by uninstalling it, moving the driver, restarting and reinstalling.

this actually worked.

i'll have to test it a bunch more. but i think that's it: i need to bust the underlying windows architecture flat out and reinstall it.

why that might be is a different question....

it doesn't seem to be actually recognizing the device as the same device when i turn it off and on, and further experiments have just brought me back to randomness: sometimes i get the high filter, sometimes i don't. it's not the flash that's actually doing anything, or the driver reinstall. it's just turning the device off and on. it keeps adding a new unique streaming device in: sad 12, 13, 14, 15....

i think i kind of have to get that right, first. none of the other devices are doing this.

it suggests in the documentation that i should turn the device on before the machine. i never have. but, i'm going to see if it make a difference in recognizing the device as the same device or not.

it's not actually connected to the streaming proxy service, it just seemed to be. it must have been something else running under there.

i'm at somewhat of an impasse again. the flash is fixing it, which again seems to reduce it to a driver issue.

i'm running out of patience. i'm going to see if i can stabilize it on this install. if i can't, i'm going to do a final install and just flash on every use. i'm really sick of this, take no enjoyment in it and want to get back to what i was doing.

my understanding of the situation is continuing to evolve. i've isolated the proper components, it's just a question of getting them in the right order.

the reinstall with the registry run removed eliminated all bleeding, but brought me back to the point where the highs are turning off and on. but, i've learned that this is not random, as i previously thought. rather, it's connected to the streaming proxy service - the broken clock.

when this service is launched, i get the full spectrum. when it's not, i get reduced highs. and, when it turns off [as it does], i get those annoying cut-outs.

but, the service doesn't launch through foobar - it only launches through cubase. again, this is explanatory, as i was noticing that cubase sounds differently than foobar. the service will sometimes stay on after i close cubase, at which point the foobar out will keep the highs - until it stops, when the highs drop. further, whether it launches with cubase or not is sporadic.

the firmware flash is no longer modifying the output, which indicates that the issue was in fact in the registry. but, it's also made it more difficult to get back to the sweet spot. the flash doesn't always work.

i strongly suspect that the point i'm at right now was the starting point; the sound is acceptable, and probably defines the differences i was noticing previously between the different hardware, and just thought was hardware dependent. it's relatively mild. but, now that i know it's not clean, i have to fix it.

the basic problem seems to be that the service is no longer connected to the devices.

but, i know that if i connect the service to the devices via the registry run on the install then i get fading.

i'm also noticing that the other card in the machine is maintaining consistency with the weak highs. in the past, i may have misinterpreted this - i may have taken the consistency as indicating both cards were working, and then concluded the output was solid, when in fact there seems to be a root problem that is affecting both cards.

there's two things i can try.

the first is that i can try a reinstall without breaking that first aspect of the clock. as mentioned before, it's only that first part that i'm certain i was reinstalling and only the first that windows is recognizing post-break. the other two, i'm just blurry about. i'll have to check to see what i get out of that - and i can do partial installs for this purpose.

if that creates the same basic issue, the next step is to put that part back in the registry run on the driver install.

if that brings me back to the bleeding, i can try and take out the entire clock break.

so, that means i'm now going beyond trying to get back to where i was and trying to fix a problem that was there the whole time but that i never noticed.

i don't think it will be much longer. i'm pretty sure i've got my head around this, now - i'm no longer taking guesses. the guesses have isolated the issue, and now i'm zeroing in on it.

i tested the issue by flashing the device and leaving it on for a reboot. if it was a firmware corruption, it should have come up clean on the reboot - because the device stayed on. but, it didn't. so, it's an error that's happening when windows recognizes the device. and, because it's not happening on the flash, it has to be the result of some kind of corrupt registry setting - because everything else would be the same, whether it's rebooting itself on the flash or being read as a device by windows.

when i do the reinstall, i'm going to try and clean as much out of the registry as i can get out of it - and i do think i can probably get this to work. but the class installer uses long strings of numbers that are difficult to track down.

i can't explain why this wasn't happening previously - except that it maybe was, and i didn't notice. which is another layer to keep in mind as i'm reanalyzing material.

the other thing is that i have a vague recollection of deleting the filters on the install a while back. so, those filters might have been gone for quite a while. i can't clearly remember. that's something i can script, and should so i don't forget.

the driver reinstall helped substantially, but it still seems a little distorted, so i'm going to reinstall a final time - i feel i have to to be sure i've actually hit the root of the problem. but i think i'm starting to finally get my head around what actually happened.

1) i think i cleared out the registry on the last reinstall, some time ago - whenever it was. spring of 2014, maybe.
2) then at some point in may i put that file back (streamci.dll).
3) on a driver reinstall (these are done from time to time, to deal with funny plugins), that screwed up the registry.
4) when i deleted the clock before, it didn't matter - because i wasn't really using it for this device. but, the combination of the driver install and the undeletion of the clock created a conflict. i suspect i should be able to reinstall the clock after i stop the drivers from entering that information into the registry.

the root cause of all of this, then, seems to be the driver install with the streamci.dll in place. i suppose i may have exaggerated something with that codec install, but it wasn't the actual crux of the problem.

it's continuing to behave poorly, but it really has to be a registry issue. i'm going to try a driver reinstall, but if that doesn't work i'll have to back up and do it again - this time inserting a wipe before the reboot, to prevent the install from completing.

on a clean sweep install with everything the way it was saved a few weeks ago, which means that the streaming proxy bit & clock are broken, it no longer bleeds. it's stable on the out. but, the out is missing a layer at the high end. it sounds like less an eq dive and more like a straight low pass, but i'm suspecting it's more along the lines of that a part of the stream is broken. it's pretty high - around 10 Khz or so. and, if you'll recall, this was the basic problem i noticed in the first place, which had me mixing higher than i wanted.

but, here's an interesting fact: i've pointed out before that a firmware flash resolves the issue. and, that's what is continuing to happen, but only until i reboot the device. it's quite strange.

in theory, i could just flash the firmware every time i turn the device on. but, that's kind of scary. if the power goes out when it's flashing, i could brick the device. and, if the issue is that the firmware is instantly corrupting, i want to think about replacing it.

this is a track i mixed with the highs faded out, and it sounds extremely tinny to compensate.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/im-sure-your-mom-is-probably-a-very-nice-person

the exaggerated painfully tinny distortion is a consequence of having the volume cut at that frequency.

as mentioned previously: i'm absolutely certain that i've updated those streaming drivers before. and, when they're installed, the audio has a thicker sound that is preferable. but, it's the only thing left to test.

no. it ended up fading again...

i'm down to my last reinstall. i'm going to not reinstall the clock at all this time. if this doesn't work, i'll be forced to conclude i have broken hardware.

i'll at least now have time to save up. i'll have to think carefully about whether or not i decide i want to mix on the m-audio card in the mean time.

well...the last, final check will need to be an install on a vanilla xp. but, it would make no sense to think that would work. it's just a final confirmation.

the fade ultimately sounds like some kind of limiter that kicks in around 5000 hz, and makes the end result sound very compressed. i can't mix around this.

and, the highs are a little weak in the same spots. ok. it seems like i'm flat. let me convince myself entirely. but i think i'm back in business. i may have to revisit a few things for a slight treble boost, but i think i'm ready to go.

from the rooftops, shout it out...

things are back to "normal", now. i'm just not sure that's for the best, quite yet.

returning back to the initial script actually created the following flow:

1) install windows - with streamci.dll & the clock in place
2) install the m-audio drivers & other basic drivers. reboot.
3) install tons of software & the mixer & line6 drivers. reboot.
4) on the reboot, streamci is run as a dll. then the script runs: which deletes streamci.dll and breaks the clock.

when it came back up, something familiar happened that i hadn't seen in a while: it took a very long time to load cubase. i can see now that this is a consequence of breaking the clock. but, only the streaming server needed to be reinstalled. the other two appear to be unused by any of the cards. i was certain about that one, and less certain about the other two.

my hypothesis is that what i want to happen is for the drivers to install properly, and then i want to break the clock and reinstall it in such a way that the drivers aren't directly connected to it. that would make sense if i was essentially getting a conflict between the clock in the mixer and the clock in software. i don't want these synced. i think that breaking it and reinstalling it essentially unsyncs them.

so, it's stable. i'm quite confident that this is the setup that i've had over the last year and a bit - that is, this is workable and i'm not worried about it breaking.

but in the course of playing with a hundred things, i think i managed to make it sound a little better. and, now i'm wondering if i can't find a way to get back there.

what i'm going to want to do is test it against other cards. what i want is not the "best" sounding output but the most accurate sounding output. the bass sounds great, and the highs are stable but they seem a little weaker than they were at points, previously. but, is it the case that i was exaggerating the highs (and just like that better) or is the case that i'm still a little flat?

obviously, i can't expect everything to sound identical. but, the laptop is still the flattest source, and the best comparison i have.

should i be convinced that the tracks are clean, i can get back to mixing. if i'm not convinced, i'll have to take a look at possible approaches to aligning the output on the card. and then lock that down into the script.

the laptop is not quite able to produce the same bottom end, but i am legitimately happy with these mixes. it'd be really nice if i could just move on already. soon, hopefully....

my original script notes indicate that i had the file deleted along with a pile of networking files. i no doubt thought it was for network streaming. deleting anything that could be used for behind the scenes network traffic was the primary motivation in cutting the install up. it was just purely by accident that i was deleting it, and the only reason i put it back was that the dialog box was annoying.

so, this is a little embarrassing, really - i caused this problem myself. but i'm now absolutely certain it's resolved, too....

my idea that i got a corrupted dll in an update is not right. the modify date seems to be connected to the burn date on the dvd; the dll is passing a crc with a version from 2001 - meaning the dll has probably *never* been updated.

this piece of gear has a bad reputation, and i guess this is a plausible explanation for it - the driver install breaks it. i just never noticed because i always deleted the class installer before the install finished.

yeah. that was it. i'm getting very, very clear and stable highs - so clear, it's kind of shocking that i ever thought what i was getting before was clear. but, the bass seems a little weak. i'm not sure if that's relative, or if there's some remnants floating around in the registry, so i'm going to put the script back to the way it was - delete streamci.dll and break the clock on install - test a little further and then probably do another reinstall.

yeah, my back-up script change-log is dated to april 26th and it doesn't make mention of streamci.dll. so, it was taken out of the script in may or june. i may have previously never attempted to install drivers without deleting streamci.dll first.

the streamci.dll file on my xp disc is dated to april, 2014. so, it must have been updated in one of the very last xp updates that i slipstreamed in. it might have broken something. if i can demonstrate that this is stable, i'm going to try another reinstall with an older version of streamci.dll - one that is at least as old as the drivers.

simply disabling the wdm driver produced a stable output, but it was a little flat - it didn't sound right.

the autorun in the registry is running streamci.dll as an executable and carrying out a number of commands related to the wdm and the clock. that makes perfect sense - it's the class installer. but, that seems to be what's screwing it up. and, it's still the clock. and still windows, like i thought at the very start...

streamci.dll was also in my initial delete script, but i took it out a while back because i'd get "missing or corrupt" errors on the first boot after a driver reinstall. i can't date this, but it's not that long ago. april, maybe, even. i can see now why that is. but, in the past, that means the autorun didn't actually execute - because the dll wasn't there.

so, i tried reinstalling the drivers with the streamci.dll deleted and the autoruns removed (i'd just get the error if they were there...) and it seems to be stable.

no, it seems like it's a driver conflict after all. the driver that's in conflict?

itself.

might explain why it didn't want to isolate...

the mixer loads two drivers: one for direct access, one over "wdm". i'm almost certain that the final solution, for now, is to disable the wdm driver.

the wdm driver is being used to playback final mixes over foobar, and i would absolutely like to resolve the concern. it wasn't like this before. but it seems to be a registry add.

if i uninstall and reinstall the drivers, it will be stable after the first reboot and gets funny on the second. some values are added to the registry on start-up. this seems to be the actual cause.

for now, i'm not worried about fixing the wdm streaming. i'll just leave it off when i get back to it. when i wake up...

but, again: it's bizarre, difficult to isolate for problems, one after another.

dammit.

again.

ugh.

i'm going to break the clock again and see what happens...

it seems like that flattened it out. which is weird. because i thought it was the problem in the first place. and it left it a little jagged - but at least it's not bleeding.

i have an idea...

there's three drivers attached to the system clock in xp. there's the streaming proxy, which i'm nearly absolutely certain was functioning before this mess. there's the microsoft streaming proxy clock, which i'm pretty sure was functioning. and, then there's the microsoft streaming proxy quality manager which i have little to any memory of. i suspect it's the third of these...

when i modified the script, i removed the deletion on all three. so, the issue may have been sitting under my nose the whole time.

i'll have to test. again. ugh. but, it's gotta be it.

i swear, my body has loosened up by a factor of 80%, if such things can be measured, which of course they can't. but whatever stress buildup existed is fading away. and, that should actually help me focus a bit better.

it should also help me kick the cigarettes. it seemed pointless when i didn't know how much longer i'd be alive...

i bought one more pack for the next day or two. i need to put the election shit down and get through the remaining tracks for this. that last track is bugging me, because it just sounds kind of odd. i may end up replacing it after all. and, the next few should be pretty quick to pass over.

my odsp was extended until 2020.

i can stop worrying about that, now.

by 2020, i am exceedingly confident that i will complete my discography and be moving into phase 2.

checks

hi.

just letting you know that my disability extension was approved, so i have checks ready to give paul for the rest of the year, whenever he's home to take them.

j

not updating i still don’t fully understand this

this one is a little different. i initially rendered it on july 5, with an unknown combination of ram and save mixer settings - but that i think was close to mostly saved settings. the fact that it sounded bad was one of the first things that tipped me off to the broken drivers. i noticed that it sounded better in cubase than it did through foobar, so i re-rendered and re-uploaded it on july 12th with completely saved settings.

it doesn't pass an a/b with reset mixer settings. so, i'm just going to leave it as it is.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/i-still-dont-fully-understand-this

not updating in some neighbourhoods the boogeyman is slightly more than an imaginary monster

same as the others.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/in-some-neighbourhoods-the-boogeyman-is-slightly-more-than-an-imaginary-monster

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/ogyanemob

not replacing thug culture is enforced by the media from the top down

yeah, this is static.

the gain on the tracks is clipping mildly, but it's covered by the compression on the master. it took me a few tries to figure it out (and fears my drivers were broken again...), but rendering the tracks separately through the initial eqs is introducing clipping that transfers over - because they clip clean, when not sent through the compression. that's not something i can work around. modifying the volume will modify the null.

again: the neurotic geek in me wants bitwise perfection, but the a/b's tell me this is pointless, anyways.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/thug-culture-is-enforced-by-the-media-from-the-top-down

contemplating replacing thug culture is enforced by the media from the top down

i'm still determining whether i want to replace this one or not for idealist mathematical reasons of it being bitwise identical to the initial save - although that's going to be false for the bulk of what i end up constructing. but, the reality is that it also fails the a/b and anything i replace the existing file with will be inaudibly different from the existing file. so, this is also done, for all intents and purposes.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/thug-culture-is-enforced-by-the-media-from-the-top-down

not updating use value is somewhat difficult to define in the human propensity towards artistic expression

this track has also not been modified, and also failed the a/b.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/use-value-is-somewhat-difficult-to-define-in-the-human-propensity-towards-artistic-expressio

not updating there is definitely something wrong with hipster homophobia

i've skipped a few tracks because they have more complex constructions. this track does not pass an a/b, either, but the version that's uploaded is already the mathematically correct one, so there is no change.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/there-is-definitely-something-wrong-with-ironic-hipster-homophobia

i'm getting a better understanding of the mixer error.

it's 1/3 of a decibel somewhere in the bottom mids. like, honestly: 0.3333333333.....

that suggests some kind of rounding error as a consequence of a type conversion. but it seems to be hard coded into the program.

i'm not hearing it in most a/b's, and the compression i'm using is wiping it out almost entirely with that mild adjustment.

as mentioned: i'm neurotic. i must check.

but, it's almost certainly going to be more or less universally inaudible in anything with any compression. and, that's good news.

updating the threat of terrorism is used to restrict civil liberties

i've corrected this mix, but i doubt you'll be able to hear the difference - because i can't. the eq on the bass was demonstrating the mixer problem that i've now determined is widespread. i've corrected it to be the same mix that i initially created in ram in a mathematical sense, but this is a kind of an idealist triviality. multiple a/b testing has determined that i cannot identify which is which. in fact, the difference file even nulls over the verses under the mastering compression.

initially written in 1996. recreated in feb, 1998. reclaimed june 29, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning electronics on aug 11, 2015. 

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-threat-of-terrorism-is-used-to-restrict-civil-liberties


https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/werso-smidits

the drivers are totally stable, finally. i'm a little apprehensive about rebooting, but for now everything seems ideal.

but, because i'm neurotic, the mixer issue presents a big challenge. i have multiple possible mixes, resulting from the mixer doing weird things. a little bit of further testing suggests that saving the mixer file separately produces corruption on the save, but saving it with the project produces corruption on the load. it's bizarre, frankly. the only dlls it's pulling are in the kernel; it's not even reading any of the C libraries. my best guess is that's probably a mathematical error in the code. but, knowing that doesn't address the issue at hand: which do i use? do i start over?

when i go over this for the already finished tracks, i'm going to be very selective in what i replace. i know that most of the songs were saved repeatedly before i exported, meaning i've verified that the final out is desirable. and what i'm noticing is that i often can't tell the difference between the mixer error on an a/b. i've tested it quite a bit at this point. it comes out in the null, but i can't actually hear it.

but, i'm neurotic.

so, for these songs that i'm approaching with a fresh understanding of the software, i have to work each of these parts out on an a/b basis.

there was never a benefit in the fading highs. but, when the subbass was floored, it made me think about a few things a little differently. and i'm going to want to work a bit of that in.

it might work out as a net positive in the end. but, i'm bloody happy that this mess is done with. it's just that putting the pieces back together is not going to be that quick, after all. lots of listening. lots of comparing.

lots of being neurotic.

i am finally convinced that i'm stable. i suspect that the problem was in fact the bios and that the perception of other fixes having an effect was probably due to these things resetting the sync, temporarily.

i think i should get most of this done by the end of the weekend.

for my own reference....

this is my workflow for the next little bit:

1) finish inri007-inri009. this should be fairly quick.
2) finish aleph-0 (period 1) dvd disc. this should be fairly quick.
3) finish remaining dvd discs. a week or two.
4) as i am finishing (3), i'll want to go through and finalize the remaining period 2 discs. similarly.
5) start on period 3. i'm well behind schedule, but this is when the next collection of big projects will begin.

deathtokoalas
never did get into the beach boys. more of a beatles fan. but this song really hit me just the right way when i was about ten or so.

their bassist was actually a rather substantial musical influence on me and, along with mccartney, still really forms the crux of how i approach the bass guitar, underneath however many other influences.

jim m
+deathtokoalas beetles? stones

deathtokoalas
+jim m the rolling stones created almost nothing of any lasting value. their legacy will die with their fan base.

the beatles-stones debate is an anachronism. people will follow their parents. bloody wankers. but anybody under 40 (if not 50, nowadays) can clearly here that the stones were not in the same league as the beatles. it's the same thing with the beach boys, really.

we can have beatles-floyd debates - and i may side with floyd, depending on the context. or maybe beatles-byrds debates, if you're so inclined. but a beatles-stones debate is pointless. it's like arguing the relative merits of thomas pynchon v. dr. seuss.

Anonymous User
+deathtokoalas Nothing of lasting value? The Beatles are undeniably a major influence to many artists, but to act like the Rolling Stones made nothing of lasting value is hilariously wrong. I'm not even a Rolling Stones fan, I would also rather listen to The Beatles, but let's not kid ourselves.

Jake Britt
+deathtokoalas Brian Wilson is the guy The Beatles went to for their inspiration...

deathtokoalas
+Anonymous User they never even released a mediocre record. their one attempt at doing something interesting - satanic majesties request - is just laughably bad.

they were talentless hacks. they were always absolute followers - there's not an original idea in their discography. they may have some place in the history of fashion. but, they will be lucky to get a footnote in the musical history of the period. the beatles, on the other hand, will be remembered for quite some time.

it's all ** or * records - out of ten stars.

they'll have a better chance in a paragraph on the mahavishnu orchestra.

"john spent his early days loosely attached to a clownish group of bohemian village idiots called 'the rolling stones' before he began his career in earnest. remaining information about this group is scarce, but it is known that they were of great popularity in their day amongst the uneducated, rural underclass."

deathtokoalas
+Jake Britt that's a poor way to express the relationship between brian wilson and paul mccartney. there was a kind of a rivalry. brian wilson was very impressed by revolver, and made pet sounds in response to it. mccartney was impressed by pet sounds, and countered with sgt. peppers. his inability to top sgt. peppers is the actual reason that brian wilson never released another record. it drove him insane.

fwiw, mccartney has since acknowledged the importance of the session musicians on pet sounds. he was not initially aware that the bass parts were mostly written and performed by carol kaye, for instance. and, he seemed to be a little taken aback by that, as though a fraud had been exposed to him.

it finally sounds right again.

i think it was the bios...

let's see what happens when i wake up. i really, really want to get back to work and am going to get upset if it's still broken.

you know, that's not sitting with me well. the bios revision would have to be at least 2008. this version of xp is slipstreamed up to the end of the product cycle. i can't think of anything that would default to jan 1, 2002.

it fixed itself on the reinstall. but it's just weird.

the reinstall came up dated to jan 1, 2002. bios date. i had to restart the process, because i can't have my system files dated that incorrectly.

but it got me thinking.

setting the clock in windows changed it in the bios, indicating these things are in sync. if the bios was corrupt, it could have been counting slightly wrong. and, that could have resulted in the whole system being out of sync, leading to the fading i was getting.

we'll have to see what happens. but i've all but ruled out a driver conflict, and i'm certain the driver clocks were installed right. yet, i was still getting what seemed like timing errors.

we'll see how this works out. but that cmos reset may turn out to be the fix.

that battery has never been replaced. it's only eight years old. but the board shipped with two. it's worth a shot if it's still bleeding.

hrmmn....

went i went to reinstall, i noticed i was missing a drive at the bios stage, which came back after i reset the cmos.

you know, it's ok if you don't know what the fuck i'm talking about. you signed up for music updates, not computer troubleshooting. i dunno. maybe you're learning something.

i can't know what caused that, but it's something to take note of. if i really did get attacked by something, that's the last thing i can think of resetting.

i had a bad flash last year that cost me months. i ended up getting a bus pirate to fix it, so it won't be nearly the problem it was then. but, i'm still wanting to avoid that....

let's see what happens on the reinstall.

well, that was pyrrhic. cubase wouldn't load the dongle, so i tried to reinstall and now it's crashing; this is a known issue, the setup files require something i remove in the wipe. i need to reinstall.

i think i've determined that the only logical cause of error is the creative emulation driver. it's the only other thing that the system is accessing.

we'll see what happens, but i've been getting downright *annoyed* over the last 48 hours or so. this is not fun.

my odsp is late. i'm going to flip out if i get denied, and spent my last few months doing fucking computer troubleshooting. it makes me want to vomit.

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.

uninstall h20 driver, alesis drivers, reinstall h20 driver, reinstall alesis drivers ----> apparent success. i'll have to test further when i wake up.

if this turns out to be a fix, i can only conclude that there's a third driver causing the conflict, because i don't touch the h20 driver in the script. i'm still leaning towards line6.

reinstall drivers with h20 driver disabled ----> success

reload with h20 driver disabled: fail. fading highs.

i don't think it's the driver, exactly. way back when i started this, i said something like "how did the user mode driver framework get turned on? i wipe that in the script.". the answer is that cubase installs it. i must have reinstalled cubase at some point since the last reinstall.

first, i need to ensure this is repeatable.

h20 driver load: fail. fading highs.

ok. good news is it's totally stabilized, convincingly, and i'm certain it could stay like that if i left it that way. sounds just like through the laptop - clean drivers, stable, no ambiguity.

bad news is that means there's a conflict somewhere, because i turned off every single sound-related driver and reinstalled the mixer drivers to get to that point.

i'm hoping it's the line6 drivers, because there was already a known issue with them. but, what i'm going to have to do now is turn each driver on one by one and see where it breaks. it might even break twice, who knows.

see, i'm not reproducing this..

so, whatever busted the output resolved itself.

see, what i did was cut the program while the mixer was on, then restart the mixer. and that fixed it in real time. then i rebooted.

so, it could have been some kind of crossed path. the hardware mixer might have picked up something connected to the m-audio card, then dropped it and recreated a correct path, which it's now holding to.

hopefully, it's that easy.

process explorer...

this is a tool i forgot about entirely, and it's kind of exactly what i needed the whole time. it might be able to help me figure out what's going on with the mixer settings not saving. for now, i loaded it up to try and tell me what's going on with the drivers.

the only thing that's running that's accessing anything sound related is foobar. i've got kmixer running in the system. nothing else.

but, there were three programs running under explorer (along with foobar) that may be screwing something up. the first is devldr32.exe. this is a file for the soundblaster that most people agree is useless, and may even be corporate spyware. it stands for "device loader" - relevant. i've taken it in and out of the script over the years and ultimately left it run because it seems to be benign. turning this off did not make a difference. i'm not completely convinced.

the second is the cubase dongle emulator. this might seem to be the most likely culprit, but if it is then it's somewhat of an irresolvable error - it's required to run cubase. but, i've never had this issue before. and, it doesn't seem to be accessing anything that ought to interfere with playback. nor did turning it off make a difference.

the third is a task-bar program for the m-audio card that functions as a replacement for sndvol32. there's no handles open to anything relevant. but, cutting this had an immediate - albeit extremely negative - effect on the audio output. it collapsed into am radio.

so, i noted as much and rebooted...

on reboot, it seemed to return to consistency - leading me to think that something may have been crossed and that crashing it may have fixed it.

it's too early to say for sure. but, it's clear that there at least *was* a conflict. i'll have to spend the rest of the day listening to see if it comes back, and if turning that program off altogether (it's not really required in any way) makes any difference.

ugh. drivers are funny again. fading highs. thought i fixed that...

i'm certain that the difference in the outputs is due to the eq issue in cubase and not the drivers; this driver issue is not affecting the way that cubase calculates the out, it's only affecting the way i hear it. so, i'm not getting different mixes as the result of the fading highs, i'm just hearing it output differently. and, i'm actually pretty happy with the existing mixes - there's only a couple of the first 12 i want to change.

of course, i can't mix moving forward if i can't hear it right. so, i'm back to the initial problem. but, i have a different set of bounds to work within.

a slightly unsual request

jessica
hi...

i have somewhat of a request. i initially asked my sister, but she doesn't have the space. and, to be honest, i'm not sure it's the best idea, anyways. that's a scary preface; it's not what you think.

i don't want to freak you out or anything, and the truth is that we don't know each other very well and this is the kind of thing that would require a very long explanation to even begin to understand, and i'm hard to understand in the best of situations, but i've been thinking for some time about what it is that i'm going to leave the world. people have different ideas about why we exist and what is that we're to do when we're alive. i'm pretty unconventional about this, i think pretty much everything about our lives is absurd and entirely pointless. it would make sense if i wrote you a book, it really would, but it won't otherwise...

the short end of it is that what i have is a lot of data. i don't really have much else, and i'm not really interested in much else. but i am sort of interested in having that data outlive me. i guess that the desire to have something outlive us - to leave some kind of memory - is somewhat of a universal. i'm some kind of abstract artist. it's not really that unusual for me to want to preserve it some way.

so, what i'm looking for is somewhere to place that data. an archive, if you will. i'm not going to find myself a museum any time soon. i have the internet, but it only offers the possibility to store parts of it. so, i can upload a song to the internet. but i'd like to have somewhere to store all the files i used to build the song, &etc.

it's the kind of thing that - in the end, who knows what happens to it. it could sit in your closet for thirty years and be destroyed by a fire. it could be found by an art critic in 2132 and proclaimed brilliant and ahead of it's time. or, it could just be a source of amusement two to three generations down the road, as a time capsule of the early twenty-first century...

so, my request is that you allow me to mail you a series of blu-ray discs that document completed projects as i complete them. i'll order these in a logical manner that will make whomever finds them able to understand them. a bd-rom is 25 gb; there shouldn't be more than twenty in total, and will probably be less than ten.

now, i need to be clear: i'm really not asking you to *do* anything with these discs, i'm just asking you to put them in a box somewhere and ensure that that box is safe, and maybe pass it down when the time comes with the instructions to continue it forwards, until somebody decides to take a look in it and do something with it or throw it away.

a rather strange request on some level - i agree. but not *that* strange. not really...

the youngest aunt
Well hello there! That is a pretty unusual request. Especially as I live in a tiny house and already have too much stuff. Perhaps if I had a big house with lots of storage space I could consider this request. Why not find someone who might be interested in this sort of thing? Someone on a music blog or whatever. You could also make a will and leave it as part of your estate.

I know you are a very different sort of human and your creative expression is paramount in your life. Surely you have connected with others who have ideas about what to do with your data? You should write a cbc radio doc about this. It is an interesting dilemma.

You say everything about our lives is absurd and pointless, which is probably true, but I hope you are happy in Windsor. Do you go to Detroit much? Must be a cool music scene there.

jessica
i've been a little disappointed in the music scene in detroit, but it might be partially a function of how hard it is to get around in it, and i may have just not found the right space. detroit's been through a lot of financial problems, and is still run as a joint subsidiary of ford and little caesars, which has gutted any kind of public transportation. the buses off the main line up woodward stop running at 9-10 pm. and the urban sprawl is immense.

one answer is to get a bicycle, but i'd have to leave it there locked up somewhere. there's really only one way over, which is a tunnel bus, and they don't allow you to bring a bicycle on it because of anti-terrorism legislation. you can't walk or bike over the bridge because of a string of suicides in the 70s.

there have been a few times when i've been over to see touring bands. but i don't see much of an organic scene at all. in 2015, you'd expect an organic scene in detroit to be more leaning towards techno and hip-hop than punk rock or motown, but even with that caveat it seems very small. it's consistently the same handful of local bands at every bar, "museum" and "house". the kind of thing you'd expect more from a small town. i guess, in literal terms, detroit is actually little more than a small town nowadays. i had some obvious concerns about walking around in detroit late at night, but what i learned is that it's so amazingly empty that i'm more likely to get attacked by coyotes than people. even when you get out to the suburbs a little, the population density is really amazingly low. it's a big area with a lot of people but they're separated by a huge distance, which makes it seem like a nexus of small towns rather than an integrated metropolitan area.

i'll find something to do with this. i had some ideas attached to the premise of leaving it within the extended family, as some kind of proof i existed. but, if that's not going to play itself then so be it.

the youngest aunt
I've been living so long in small towns now it's a trip to be in urban areas. I can imagine the destroyed Americaness of Detroit. You know the distant, unknown aunt used to live in Windsor. I remember visiting them in the 70's and the crazy stories of them living in run-down apartment buildings in Detroit. the distant, unknown aunt sleeping with a big knife under her pillow. She's always been paranoid. Maybe that's where it started. Sounds post-apocalyptic and surreal.

It's nice talking to you. Let's keep this up. I'm off to Montana to see Wilco this weekend. Stoked!

i've decided that the best way to deal with this for this particular collection of songs is just to:

1) open each project.
2) reset all the eqs.
2) load all the eqs.
3) export each individual track with the eqs and effects on them.
4) render.
5) save.

i'll have to check on a file-by-file basis, but i do believe that this should create outs that null with the files i have on the drive, which is largely what i want.

obviously, i want the project files to save the eqs properly, but it doesn't seem to want to do so and i'm kind of more interested in getting this done right now than i am in figuring that out.

i still don't know how long this has been happening for, or why it all of a sudden became apparent for these specific tracks if it had been happening the whole time. but, i'll have to try a similar process for each track after inri024 and see whether the outcomes are noticeable/preferable or not.

for now, if this process works then i should be back to working on the last few tracks of this within a day or two.

although, i should take note of this: when i open any of these projects, and close them again without doing anything, they always ask me if i want to save the file. i always say no. but, it seems to realize that the mixer values that are loaded are different than the values in the file.

it's very strange. but i'll take the workaround, for now.

i just had an immense feeling of being overwhelmed and it's got me very anxious.

i was very careful to make sure i went through everything in order to prevent myself from spinning around in circles and losing track of myself. then, i had to spin back to 1998 to finish what i'm now calling inriclaimed in order to close the period 1 disc to move on to the later discs - and the fact that my brain has been focusing on troubleshooting for the last month has got me all jumbled up and disordered, now that i'm back at it.

i don't like that feeling. i'm very structured. very ordered.

i've got myself a flow chart. when i get into it, the anxiety will pass.

just to recall, i'm currently working on appending music to inri008 and inri009. i may end up adding a few tracks to inri007. and i've got a few extra mixes that i haven't decided on what i'm doing with, yet.

this is inri008:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrimixed

this is inri009:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriclaimed

ok, i'm back up.

i'm going to put off double checking the renders until i get back to finalizing period 2.

this is my workflow for the next little bit:

1) finish inri007-inri009. this should be fairly quick.
2) finish aleph-0 (period 1) dvd disc. this should be fairly quick.
3) finish remaining dvd discs. a week or two.
4) as i am finishing (3), i'll want to go through and finalize the remaining period 2 discs. similarly.
5) start on period 3. i'm well behind schedule, but this is when the next collection of big projects will begin.

i need to put everything back together one last time.

i'll be back to work soon.

that's almost six weeks, to conclude there's no answer.

ugh.

at least i understand, now...

no difference in behaviour on the pIII through the audigy - with a vanilla xp sp3 install.

so, that's tested on two different computers through three different soundcards. it's a programming error.

ugh.

i installed cubase on the pIII, but it was full of errors and ultimately the licensing didn't work. i was going to have to reinstall anyways after that, so i'm going to wipe it and put a vanilla sp3 on it. i've worked it down to processor or program error - or the obscure possibility that it might still be ram.

it should install fine on a vanilla sp; there's an audigy in there, it should pick it up through asio. if i get the same results, it's absolutely the program.

but, for this machine, i'm not as convinced of this. if i get different results, i'm leaning towards it being an error coming out of doing 32-bit math on a 64-bit processor. that's ultimately a programming error, as it really shouldn't happen. but it's the only thing i can really make sense of. i'll be able to verify that through this process. but, it means i can't rule out the ram.

what i'll have to do to rule out the ram is to find a way to get it up on this thing - maybe try vmware. i fully expect no change on this laptop, but we'll see.

but before i go out of my way on that, i'll wait to see what happens on the pIII. if i get the same thing, it's just the program and there's nothing else to do...

you know, i'm not sure why i thought loading cubase in virtualbox would be an easy task...

it doesn't know how to read the soundcard emulation. it's not going to figure it out. and i don't know how useful the test would be anyways.

this laptop was given to me as a gift. i'm grateful for it, no doubt. but, it has a chip in the bios that prevents xp from loading. no joke. microsoft is that neurotic about it. i'm not particularly keen on a reinstall, but it's not an option, anyways.

i do not believe that there is a way to install the h20 drivers in windows 7.

my other modern laptop has the same issue. my ancient laptop is ancient. you don't understand. 1997, i think.

that leaves my living room pc as the only serious option, although it's stripped down so far that it might not install. i've run cubase on it in the past, but not sx3. it's the exact reason i upgraded; it was just not useful to run a daw on. pIII. 500 Mhz. well, there's only one way to find out what happens...

yes. i have a pIII kicking. it just sends youtube videos to a tv i found on the side of the road. and audio signals to the stereo. but i wrote a third of the discography on it...

actually, that might be a better idea, because it's the only specifically 32-bit processor around. i suspect that this may be significant.

i still have testing to do, but i've more or less ruled out the ram. everything remains completely consistent, regardless of which slots i use or which sticks i put in.

i don't think it's the board, either.

i'm demonstrating that the output is very consistently different after the save. but i'm also demonstrating that it's always the same before the save, and always the same after the save. i had to test this because i'm running out of ideas, but i can't really build a chain of logic that would implicate the ram.

i'm going to test on the laptop. but i'm almost entirely convinced that this is a programming error that i just never noticed and that the outputs from july are closer to the direct ram output due to an error in the drivers that sort of cancelled it out. while that might have resulted in cleaner renders for those specific files, it's likely not reproducible and i'm going to just have to adjust - or switch to another daw.

i just spent 6 weeks trying to correct a systems collapse, only to realize that there's a programming error in cubase.

it's minor. i only noticed it due to a driver break. it was there all along. i'll work around it.

uploads should resume shortly, and i should be able to push into period 3 within a few weeks.

ok.

so, i can demonstrate that drawing it in *does* in fact create different values than dialing it in - which is actually reasonable and likely by design. drawing it in is picking a point on a continuous curve, whereas dialing it in is discrete. that indicates that i shouldn't expect to be able to dial in exact eq settings that will null with settings i created by drawing. that's a step forwards in understanding.

it explains why loading the presets creates a different render than dialing them in; the presets are a combination of dials and draws, with little thought put into recreating them exactly. it explains why some tracks null quickly on reconstruction, while others don't - some eqs are drawn and some are dialed. if the eq in the original song was typed in, typing it in the reconstruction should output an exact replica; if the eq in the original song was drawn, i'd have to draw at exactly the same point, which is very low probability. so, i'd be left with little option but to import the previous mixer settings to recreate the original mix.

however, it doesn't explain why the output is so consistently different on the save when i dial it in. this could be explained by truncation error if it's saving values on the curve that needed rounding. the image map is obviously quantized, so you can only get so far with that logic - and it's not very far. but, if i'm typing in numbers then it shouldn't be rounding. i can't use this method to determine this; i know that any sort of save differs from what is in ram. so, i'd have to use debugging tools to get the numbers out of ram to compare. but, in truth it is obvious that they are different.

i'm falling asleep. i'll play with the ram in the morning.

bit of a breakthrough with this...

it crossed my mind that one way to see what it's doing with the eq values is to recreate a preset i have saved in my rampresets.xml file and save over it, then check the values. sure enough, it's saving differently. this is affirmative proof that the mixer is malfunctioning over some kind of error.

i don't want to actually debug the thing, and i guess now i don't have to - it's enough to see that the gui is highly inexact in terms of what's actually being stored, and conclude that the values that are being saved differ mildly from the values in ram.

what i need to see now is how much of this is the result of some kind of error in arithmetic and how much is the consequence of a meandering mouse. for example: let's say i set the eq in the initial file by drawing it in to the space. if i try and recreate it by typing it in, i may get an inexact value. the eqs only accept one decimal point for volume and Q and whole numbers for frequency. this might just be the way it's designed...

however, if i can demonstrate two situations where i dial in whole numbers and the result is different, i'm left to conclude that the math is failing somewhere. and, i think that's the inescapable conclusion based on what i've seen - i just have to find a way to prove it to myself.

if i can demonstrate this, that reduces the problem to three likely sources: ram, processor or programming error. i can really only test the ram.

if i cannot demonstrate this, i suppose i'll have to accept it.

but, i'll point out again that it absolutely did used to snap into place fairly quickly, and the totality of the evidence suggests a point of error at some point. if i can rule out the ram, i'll have to install cubase on this laptop for testing. i'll have little option but to conclude a malfunctioning processor.

not updating the time machine

track #2 (from the end of july, 2014) uses the cubase eq to greater effect, which has allowed for greater testing. the results are very curious, and cement a broken mixer as the cause. there's also a specific behaviour that is not asserting itself and that i believe may be at the root of the problem.

i have all of these eq settings saved in my rampresets.xml file. so, i'm testing at three levels. the first is manually entering the eq, as they exist in the preset file, without saving. the second is re-opening the file after the save. the third is loading the presets from the xml file.

this actually produces three different outputs that are clearly eq-based in the difference files. further, the results can be consistently recreated so they null with like outputs - the output will continue to null over and over after i load the presets, or before i save the file.

it is only the third option that will null with the original output.

but, here's the thing: i shouldn't have to load these presets. cubase should recognize that they are the presets in the file, and the presets should then auto-load. this is something it has always done. but, it hasn't been doing it in the time it's been weird.

i think that there's a good chance that if i can solve this problem then i'll have solved the whole problem. there's a number of things i can test for.

as it is, i currently see no reason to update this ep, which was also finalized at the end of this may. but, i'll have to do some more testing to be sure of it.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-time-machine


for now, it seems to suggest that *both* of the options i'm dealing with - rendering from ram or rendering from disk - are wrong!

not updating stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides

for the last month, i've been posting nothing but updates on trying to fix my computer and i haven't really uploaded any new songs since may because i spent june compiling...

as i go through each track i've finished or recreated over the last year to determine where the issue first arose, i'm going to post them with my analysis as to whether they're busted or not. obviously, i hope the vast majority of them demonstrate consistent, nulling behaviour.

this mix is functional. the out nulls, up to reverb plugins, through all combinations. what that seems to suggest is that i have the same configuration in place that i had in place over june of last year. i do believe that this is the correct configuration. however, that might also simply mean that the equalizers on the track are not pushing the program enough to break it.

this ep was finalized at the end of may. testing to this point indicates no further reason to update it.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/stuck-in-the-middle-of-an-alley-closing-in-on-all-sides

i have now determined with no ambiguity that the channel mixer is saving incorrectly, and that i've basically found a bug in cubase. i've determined this by isolating it to the mixer settings by exporting and importing them separately.

but, the bug does not affect *every* eq setting. so, it's not an across the board problem.

i'm going to post to a few places and see if i can get a response. i can see no obvious solution, but i need to ask around.

i now need to back up and determine a few things:

1) did this bug always exist?
2) if so, can i find this bug in other projects?
3) why did this bug *not* affect the files from the beginning of july?

this is going to be a little time consuming. it means i'm going to have to go over everything i've done since mar, 2014 and reconstruct it all in ram, then see if it nulls with the saved versions and then see if it nulls with the final versions.

what i'm going to be looking for is patterns in the eqs. are there specific shapes that break during the save?

i'm at least confident that nothing is broken - except cubase itself. so, i'm confident that i can rebuild the machine and leave it that way.

once i've determined which projects - if any - are affected and which aren't, i will probably convert those files into sonar or reaper projects. and, in the end, the end result is likely a complete migration to a different daw.

while i still think that a processor error is the most reasonable thing i can come up with, neither disabling the dep nor turning off the multicore made any effect.

i've been testing old files and have yet to produce a similar error. remember: this doesn't happen with every eq decision. nor does there really appear to be a discernible pattern regarding which ones it happens with.

i've also experimented a little with saving mixer settings and it does not seem to affect the outcome, which suggests the error must be in the save process rather than the mixer. otherwise, i could wipe the mixer and reload. but that's not working.

if i can't determine a problem in any of the previous files, i'm left to conclude that there's something very strange with these specific files. i may have to temporarily move to sonar or reaper to finish this project.

i posted some forum questions, and while the responses were not helpful, my counter-response forced me to think about it a little bit more carefully and i need to focus on processor variables.

my memory is blurry on this. i know i've experimented with environment variables. i can't remember if i had them in the script, or if there were changes on the last install.

i think that that's something i should focus on experimenting with a little bit.

but, i'm going to eat and watch the canadian election debate. i hope trump gets fired. but, i'm a canadian and it's more important to me...

the weird behaviour i'm experiencing could be the result of a threading error. in fact, now that i'm thinking about it, it really makes a lot of sense to think that it is.

if something is broken, this seems like the most likely target for being broken. but i may have just dropped something.

i reset the fan the other day because it was running kind of hot and spinning out. that took the temperature down. while the reset can't be the cause, the temperature might be a symptom. but we're not talking about really hot, either. just relatively hot.

i don't think it's damaged. but i need to play with some things.

how can i be sure it wasn't always like this? consider the following scenario:

1) i mixed everything in the condition in it's in now.
2) everything broke, creating messy renders.
3) i'm now trying to recreate messy renders in a normalized environment.

what i was trying to do was figure out which was the cleanest representation. but it was assuming the system was stable to start with.

if i can establish that it was always doing this and i just never noticed, then i can get back to what i was doing.

i think the way to do that is to rebuild the system as it was and then try and build some old files from scratch. i'll have to do a few experiments regarding the eqs.

it seems that eqs in the mid range null. the interference is happening when i modify the eq on the bottom end. but, because it then stabilizes...

it's one thing to point to this ideal. but, if i managed to accidentally get to that point briefly, and then rejected it as busted, then i'm trying to construct a utopia.

so, that gives me another day of stuff to do, anyways, before i start freaking out. and will at least allow me to better understand the breadth of the issue.

if it was always like this - except for a few weeks when it seemed like things were broken - then i'll just have to accept it.

but, if i can demonstrate that something has changed then i'll have to start looking at replacing things.

even an absolutely bare bone system is refusing to null over a simple parametric eq between saves.

i feel i've reached the limit of what i can solve. i have no further ideas. i don't believe i've found a bug, either - i've never noticed this before.

i'm going to turn the machine off for a few days and spend some time thinking. it's the beginning of the month; i have some cleaning to do. i suppose i can get serious about not smoking. do some research online.

i'm sorry, but there will not be any new music uploaded until this is resolved.

it's broken. i can't mix when it's broken.

i'm literally testing cubase, now.

it's very distressing. it was worse on the reinstall.

it suggests the only possible problem is izotope, although that doesn't add up to me based on the other testing i've done. but, we'll have to see how far i get without it and whether i can get to that conclusion or not.

i'll have to reinstall yet again to find out, because uninstalling izotope seems to have cut the right side out of cubase, and reinstalling cubase didn't help. and, to be blunt, that's a good sign.

if i work it down to that, it's a moderately sized problem. i've been using this program for quite some time, and while it's had some issues it's never been anything like this. these are old files, coming off of tape. the source needs that sort of attention.

i have a number of ideas to try and get around it if i can demonstrate it.

for now, i quite literally have one more chance to get this to behave before i start panicking. it's essentially a logical necessity that this works. there's no other possibilities to address.

again: this is fucker at the mixing desk type behaviour. so, i should be as clear as i can.

i can't be in a situation where files save differently than they exist. i'm fairly open when it comes to perception issues and whatnot. but this is just broken. there's no other way to describe it. it's just busted.

imagine the following scenario: every time you take a picture of a golden retriever, it saves as a black lab - so that when you open it in photoshop (or whatever the kids use nowadays) it's a picture of a black lab instead of a golden retriever.

"but labs are similar to retrievers!"

perhaps. but they are not the same thing. and if you take a picture of a retriever, you want a fucking picture of a retriever, not a picture of a lab.

further, if you want to edit the picture you're going to have different results. they're different colours, with different inversions that fit against different backgrounds.

it's just something i can't ignore. it's absolute file corruption. unquestionably. with no ambiguity. no grey area. files always need to null the same way every single time.

and, as mentioned: the fact that the initial constructions always null with the tracks i have saved indicates the way it's saving is just flatly wrong.

i was able to recreate precisely the same ridiculous behaviour out of my other soundcard, indicating it's absolutely software.

i’ve stripped everything out that i possibly can. honestly. the only plugin on load-up is izotope. but it only starts doing this when the eq is a specific way that it doesn't like.

so, i'm going to have to reinstall, but do it in a step-by-step fashion. that is, install only cubase & izotope and then slowly bring in each other program until i find what breaks it.

if it's immediately broken, i haven't a clue what to do next.

but i have a hunch that it's a program called reason. yes: all this ridiculous, illogical nonsense is due to a program called reason. how so?

well, i specifically remember skipping the install on it because the...it...err...it didn't work. yet, the reinstall has brought it back. i've had it sitting in that script for years, but i really never use it. there was a time when i was planning on moving more into electronic sound design, but i just never did [i still might]. i mean, i don't want to make background noise for wallpaper, but the possibilities of these programs look fairly interesting. i've just always been able to get what i want using other methods.

i don't specifically remember if it was installed directly previously to this mess. but i do remember not installing it at some point. and it loads right into cubase.

uninstalling it and then reinstalling cubase seemed to take the bleed down a notch. not enough. but a notch.

so, that's my hunch.

but, if it doesn't null on a vanilla xp with no scripts and no extra plugins? i'm fucked, basically. i might have to start looking at "upgrading" cubase.

ok, so let's review the seemingly impossible situation that i have myself in.

i have a number of project files that have not been modified in weeks, along with a number of renders of those files. the renders do not always sound good, but i believe this is because i was mixing on malfunctioning hardware. i am convinced that i have resolved the issues with the hardware, because things consistently sound the same.

when i paste source material into these projects, it does not null with itself. that is, if the project has x.wav in it and i paste x.wav into it and phase reverse it, it does not null on playback. if i then save the file and re-open it, it nulls.

if i render these files, they do not null with the renders i have saved from weeks ago. that in itself does not determine which render is "clean" and which is distorted by malfunctioning hardware.

if i export each individual file from these projects and then recreate them in new projects, the renders will initially null with original renders from weeks ago. however, if i then save the projects and render again, they now null with the renders from the original saved projects. all subsequent renders null with each other.

this exposes a more fundamental problem: projects are refusing to null with themselves after i save them.

i am certain that the renders from weeks ago were at least partially rendered from saved files.

what that means is that i am consistently rendering precisely two versions of each of these tracks - one before i save and one after.

testing up to now has indicated that the built-in equalizer in cubase may be malfunctioning when it interacts with the vst architecture. it is doing this in predictable but unfathomable ways - it seems to alter certain equalization decisions that it seems to not like.

i'm going to eat. then i'm going to do some mild testing. i think i should run a ram test. but i expect to go through another reinstall by the end of the night, but only install the precise, specific software that i need to run these projects.

while i've repeatedly seemed to isolate the problem, what i've actually done is systemically rule virtually everything out. i'm seemingly left with an error in the program. but, it is very strange that it worked for many years and stopped working all of a sudden, even on multiple reinstalls.

ants update

jessica
hi.

there's a few that have snuck in, but it's just a handful. the pesticides seem to have stopped their movement, but it does indicate that there's still a way in...

...but i noticed a large swarm of them out on the sidewalk today. i haven't seen that in a while. i think it indicates that they're moving the other way.

thinking back, there was some sewer construction right outside the place a few weeks ago, and that might have spooked them into moving in this direction. now that the construction is gone, perhaps they went back whence they came.

there's not an immediate problem. i'm not requesting action. but i think you should be aware that they are still able to get in through the holes that they burrowed, and that that might become a problem in the future.

the landlord
Thanks for the info     we will keep on top of this with your help.

ok. it could conceivably be that i'm crossing some kind of cut-off, and getting truncated. but, the card is obviously able to produce it, so it shouldn't be truncating. so, how do i turn that off?

might i happen to have randomly stumbled upon some kind of a block in cubase? ugh. i'll try another file...

wow.

i'm really not understanding what is happening.

i didn't believe what i saw at first, but i just repeated it and it is clear enough.

1) no eq--->plugin nulls before & after save.
2) random eq---->plugin nulls before & after save.
3) specific eq--->plugin does not null after save.
4) when i open the file a third time, it nulls with the after save export.

the only thing that has changed between 2 & 3 is the specific eq.

i could accept a little bit of bleed from random reverb (although none is turned on) if four were not true. but, as it is, i cannot make sense of this.

i'm going to try a different song and see what the result is. i'm really absolutely flabbergasted by that last test.

it seems to suggest that cubase is changing the specific eq on save. but just that specific one. not other ones.

i'm completely disconnected from all networks...

nope. and it's just getting weirder.

when i was testing the plugins, i didn't bother setting the eq on the tracks - what difference would that make? i was testing the plugins. but i decided that if i'm going to test all the plugins, i should set the file up in a permanent state...

instantly broke.

in order to do that, i had to copy a single file over that had my eq presets in it.

so, i deleted the user file again and tried with random, factory presets. this time it nulled.

so, i went into the xml file and manually copied the presets over. broken.

running a compare of the files in notepad++ indicates that the only real difference is the numbers. this seems to be screwing something up.

i'm going to try again, by constructing the eq presets by hand rather than copying them over and see what happens.

once again, i'm proving that anything that could possibly be broken is broken.

i'm pretty sure i'll fix the problem before i have to decompile the program, but damn...