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...

finally. it's nice to see it null. i haven't pinpointed the exact problem, but it's some kind of plugin error.

deleting all of the user folder (including all my presets...) and removing all of the plugins (except the two i'm using in the project) created a flat null. so, now i need to slowly bring the plugins in until it breaks.

i have a large amount of plugins loading that i really don't use. hopefully, it's one of those.

i'll just want to do one more reinstall after i isolate it, and then i'm hopefully back in business. 24 hours tops, i'm thinking.

what an absolute total break, though. wow.

i'll have to take a step back and look at a few things when i figure out what the error is. i'm 98% sure that all of the files from the first install were rendered after at least one close/re-open, so the plugin would have almost certainly have to have been disabled at that point. this could almost certainly not have been an issue until i reinstalled. at the end of this, new renders should null with old files. but, i think i need to test it to be sure.

i do vaguely recall disabling plugins at some time in the past, but i don't recall when or what. the error seems to be in the database, rather than the dll (because this didn't work until i deleted the user files), so i'll have to go in and manually wipe that out, too. it's the vst plugin xml file, specifically.

i fell asleep there....

it's clear that the process of opening the plugin at start-up is creating a different output than the process of adding a plugin in real-time. i'm back to the initial question: which one is corrupt?

this is harder to figure out because i don't have a baseline.

i'll have to test to see what happens upon opening, removing and replacing. if that nulls with the original files then it is definitely a difference at start-up. if it doesn't, it suggests something in the project file.

i'm also going to post to some forums, as i now have a specific question.

it's truly bizarre.

this might seem embarrassingly simple, but i need to point out that it isn't intuitive. i'm hearing several tracks go out at the same time. and the testing seemed to indicate the opposite.

but, it's the plugins. not one of the them. all of them.

if i turn all the plugins off, the file will null on an indefinite number of repeats over an indefinite number of saves. if i turn even one plugin on, the files will null predictably - until i save the file, close and reopen. then any files from that point on will null indefinitely.

it also seems the project has two states and it defaults on open. of course, that can't be right.

same behaviour on reinstall, with no script.

stumped.

obviously, fixing this is an absolute necessity. otherwise, the output is distorted.

it has to be in the software. something i'll have to test for is whether a plugin might be interfering.

that kind of makes sense. if it's already loaded on construction, it might not interfere until it reloads.

none of the drive related things made any difference. which is really pinpointing it to cubase, but what the fuck?

i'm reinstalling again. see, the thing is that my reinstall is actually pretty painless - it's entirely scripted. it's just a process of setting it in motion. i have no real fear of reinstalling, it's just a pain in the ass - and a question of risk reduction.

but, i think it's the most methodical way to do this. i want to stop before i run any user scripts, see what happens and then move forwards incrementally from there.

if it's fucked right off the bat...i'm at a loss...

if it breaks somewhere along the way, i can find the problem and correct it.

yeah, this is...

everything's set to read-only. i've been through this before and know it's an access thing, but it's...i think it's connected to reinstalling. windows is confused because it thinks the previous install owns the drive. and, even when i take ownership and delete the old user and all of these other fun things there's still remnants in the directory structure that are getting in the way. this is all over the internet, and nobody has a good answer.

i'm going to format the drive....that'll wipe out the partition table, which i think is the crux of it. an ntfs error. when i have the project in ram, it's running properly; it's when i save it to disk that it gets corrupted.

still befuddling.

the drivers are fine. thankfully.

but, here's the latest bizarre weirdness. when i line the reconstructed files up in a new project, they render clean. repeatedly. until i save and reopen the file. then i get the screwy behaviour again.

i think that's actually a hard drive issue. i'm running a chkdsk on the drive. i'll format it if that doesn't work.

whatever hit me really walloped me....

gah...

i did a grocery run in the hot afternoon heat and took forever to cool my brain down. it's getting close to bed time, but i can hopefully at least get the tracks realigned in the right way. here i go...

tim robbins was in a band?

i'm done for the night, but the problem is now solved and can actually be resolved relatively easily.

to recap:

1) around the 1st of july, i seem to have been hit with a collection of problems that nearly or exactly simultaneously broke the drivers in the soundcard, the firmware in the soundcard, something in the asio layer that affected multiple cards and something in cubase. i initially thought that this was a codec install messing with my streaming, but this no longer makes sense to me. around this time, i came into contact with a worm that i picked up in the library but i cannot otherwise trace it's effects. the cause is ultimately unknown, but the extent of the failure that resulted from it is cause for some thought as to the nature of it. it almost seems like i got stuxneted.

2) as a troubleshooting step, i ran a registry wipe on the 21st of july. the problem became noticeably worse from this point, forcing a reinstall. i understand now that this registry wipe broke my system clock, and that that error was repeated on the reinstall.

3) the system clock remained dysfunctional for some time after it was realized to be a dominant problem and fixed on the software side. the ultimate resolution to this was a firmware upgrade.

4) corruption in cubase of an unknown nature has corrupted playback on 14 of the 17 files for this project, resulting in renders that are both mathematically and audibly different than they ought to be. the cause of this is unknown, but it may be solved by reconstructing each of the projects from their relevant components.

that's a full month. gone. serious work restarts tomorrow.

i shouldn't be surprised. it's the most time consuming outcome possible.

sending each file out individually and recreating the project allowed me to create a file that nulled with the initial render. further, every one of the files nulled with their targets. so, i can create a clean sweep through rendering the files into a new project. meaning, this new project that nulls with the old render is a clean project and the project files are all warped, somehow.

the good news is that means the issue is now solved. i just have to spend the next four or five days doing this.

in some sense it's just...i don't care...fix it...

in another sense, it would be nice if there's just a little checkmark somewhere i can fix. how did i end up with 15 corrupt cubase projects at the same time?

thinking back, i may have done a copy/paste. i can't remember. i'm not going to remember that kind of trivial detail. and, while i sometimes see those "cubase has crashed, save under a different name" boxes, it's generally with midi - and that's not an issue here.

the fact that the different projects are rendering the same files differently indicates that there's either something corrupt that i can't fix or there's a project-specific setting i can switch. best start is to compare the project settings.

so, nothing about this is going to be easy, huh?

when i drop the wonky track into the project and line it up and export it, it nulls with the old file (while not nulling within the project, which seems crazy to me). then when i save it and re-open it it goes back to the new file. further, the identical files that don't null on the direct insert now null after the save and re-open. this is repeatably demonstrable, if still completely incomprehensible.

in order to be sure that what i'm comparing is stable, i have to be able to create a project that will null with the old files repeatedly and predictably. given that everything is resetting on the save, and i think that this is related to the project file, i think the only way around this is to render each track separately and build a new project. then, i'll know for sure that the out on the wonky track is really the out on the old files, and know which one i should be using.

preliminary testing suggests that a new flat render on the wonky track does null with the original file, indicating the error is on the insert. but in order to be sure that i've actually found the problem, i just need to be sure that the old flat render doesn't. if i can't get there - if it nulls through both renders - then i can't be sure i've actually solved anything.

and, if i'm not able to determine that my signal is flat, i'll have to wipe out the project files and start over.

note to the fucker at the mixing desk:

you lose.

fucker...

major progress: i was able to get one of the files to null.

it seems like it is some kind of cubase corruption. and it's the weirdest thing. i've managed to create tracks that are identical (they source from the same file, have the same start and end points, same effects) and yet do not null. but the newly inserted version nulls with the render from last month, whereas the version saved to last month does not.

hopefully, this is repeatable. if it is, i've determined what i need to do to get back to where i was.

the next thing i need to do is figure out which one of these inserts nulls with the original file. that's easy enough - i just need to render them both clean. i know they don't null with each other, against all logic. but, which one is corrupt?

i suspect that it will be the new insert that is corrupt - that is that the renders after the reinstall are the correct ones and the renders before the install are corrupt. if that's the case, i can trust the projects as i make final changes to the mixes. if not, i'll need to modify all the projects and then make final changes.

you can't accuse me of a lack of rigour, anyways.

another day of procrastination..

an election was just called in canada. true to form as the nerd that i am, the policy discussion [rather than the name-calling that will dominate the news cycle] is of great interest to me. under the proper circumstances, i could see myself running for office, one day when i'm reaching retirement age.

i'm pretty sure i've got it stable, and i just need to see, now, if there's any conceivable way to get the files to null - i need to determine whether i'm dealing with corruption at the cubase level, or if the drivers were just right fucked. i can't shake the logical flow charts that combine before the out, and the pattern turned out to be relatively weak in the end, so a broken cubase really seems like a more rational problem. but that might mean i can't recreate it at all.

on that end, i went through and made sure there were no leftover file access connections to the previous install [by taking ownership of the secondary drive i'm using], and i'm going to want to do some things like try and render from other disks, and maybe defrag it.

i may find myself in the annoying position of having mixed everything in broken cubase projects and being unable to recreate the results. not there yet...

...but i do honestly think that the drivers are really finally clean.

this is the first time in years and years that i've seen such a thing. honestly. the last time i saw any kind of worm or virus or anything of the sort was about 2004. i don't run anything to counter it. it's actually very hard to get infected, but those library machines are kind of going to be swarming with shit and i should have been more careful...guess i got complacent...

as mentioned, it couldn't do anything on my machine. the instructions would just error out. that's by design. no, bill, we don't need telnet. but, it can replicate itself and keep going. and that just might be what's been pissing me off....!

there's no sign of it in any of the registries. no remnant files. i formatted the key. i wiped the device. it's gone. but, it might be it...

i just found a worm on my usb key. i didn't think to check the date on it before i deleted it, which i immediately regretted. but the last time i brought it out somewhere was about the same time things started going haywire - to print odsp forms at the library at the beginning of july.

it's apparently a browser hijack. it wouldn't work on either of my xp pcs, because of the way i've stripped them down. i don't know how it would react on the 7 laptop, but it's probably going to come up against user privileges. i've seen absolutely no physical signs of malware, and really tend not to worry about it much. but i did notice that the drivers went bad, the last time, after i went online.

firewire is a networking device. it's not entirely insane to think it could have squirmed in there and imploded. the firmware update should remove this as anything to think about further.

it was probably sitting there for a month...wow...i need to be more aware of that...

i'm now convinced that there's corruption in the cubase files and that i can null the results by replacing the tracks. i've experienced this before, but it was with midi tracks that were easy to recreate. i'll have to convince myself with some testing. if i'm right, this might be time consuming.

i found the firmware updater on a backup drive, and it does seem to have made an immediate obvious difference, although i'll have to see if it holds. i'm going to try and rerender the files that aren't nulling, because the plot just thickened - a july 12 re-render just nulled, and that doesn't make sense because it's definitely after the break.

ok.

so everything else is nulling. this isn't an old problem that i didn't notice. i can have faith in my ears, which seem to be quite sensitive. i don't have to go back and fine comb anything.

i'm running the null tests a little further past where i did before, and i'm noticing that a pattern is developing: it's the first two tracks. always. the rest always nulls.

it's also becoming apparent that the break didn't really happen until about five tracks in. in hindsight, i think i dropped some effects work on the third and fourth, but i'll have to see if i can recreate it; i vaguely recall playing with a quadrafuzz. they're not fitting the pattern - they just seem to be missing distortion. i remember re-rendering the second because it didn't sound right [that would have been the first time i noticed it was broken], so the earliest version i have of this isn't clean. from the fifth on, i get the pattern with the first two tracks.

...which means it couldn't be the codec install, because that was a lot earlier.

i still can't explain why the first tracks are always broken, but given that it's consistent it's starting to seem more like a broken cubase.

but i'm now starting to wonder if the clock issues might be related to the constant stretching i was doing. i sent these files in in such a way that they're subtly out of sync. i then had to carefully stretch them back in sync through trial and error. could i have broken the clock in the machine?

a firmware reset in the device is a useful troubleshooting step, i just don't know if this is possible.

i'm going to finish running through nulling the sequence, and then see if i can at least get consistency over the set of new files.

it at least seems to be consistently breaking in the same way...

i'm going to see what happens if i update the drivers.

something else i'm going to want to do is render some older files, to see if the problem is older than i realize.

the files are nulling with the most recent install. while this seems to verify that something was very broken, it also seems to suggest that the reinstall didn't change anything on output. but it sounds much better.

i'm at a loss as to what else could be conflicting, if it doesn't sound right in the morning. but it's been consistent for quite some time now that it always sounds better in the morning. that's really sort of curious.

well, it sounds clean again. but i've been through this over the last few nights. hopefully, it holds this time.

the highs were fading again this afternoon. and, it does seem consistent with a clock error.

i'm reinstalling again, but this time i've made the change to not delete the clock drivers in the wipe. it can't be the root of the issue, because this wasn't happening previously. but it might help some other way.

i'm also going to refrain from installing the line 6 drivers. everything else was installed previously so it can't be the cause. i honestly don't remember if the line 6 drivers were installed, but i do remember going out of my way to avoid connecting over usb.

i could see there possibly being a usb/firewire error.

again: i don't think i'm dealing with the same issue i was initially dealing with.

nor is this machine going to connect to the internet until this project is fully completed.

i should have some testing done by the time i crash.

i can't rationalize any further: august is cold turkey. one more day for mixing has turned into a month. it just has to stop here and that's the end of it. i've had every intention and desire to quit for...months. i just couldn't deal with the tiredness when i wanted to be productive. but i've been anything but productive, and i have no prediction on how much more troubleshooting i'm doing.

worse, i may need to put money aside to replace the mixer. i'm not there yet. i will eventually run out of possible troubleshooting steps.

and, in the list of never ending gear anomalies: i seem to have picked up a driver conflict somewhere.

this could not have been the original problem because disabling everything except the mixer has not modified what nulls with what. the new outputs all null, and they don't null with the outputs from the broken mixer. it must be unique to the new install.

that also indicates that the driver conflict is only occurring on play back, not on rendering.

the good news is that i am seriously confident that disabling these other devices has finally given me consistency - i'm getting a clarity in the mixes that i haven't heard since i reinstalled. the mixes finally sound "good" again. and, it's holding.

so, what i'm going to have to do tomorrow is a lot of listening to determine where the conflict is. but about the only thing that makes any sense to me is that it's over the creative wdm. and disabling that is of no loss to me, as i only use the old soundblaster for infrequent midi purposes.

yes, this is frustrating. and annoying. but the clarity i finally got in the wee hours of the morning is a bright light at the end of the tunnel.

i'm procrastinating because i don't want to be further disappointed. but i need to get back to it.

there's an alter-reality update tonight at midnight: it is the date that i've penciled in for the release of my first electronic ep. that is dec 1, 1997. which means i'm pushing into 1998, and the real start of my electronic phase. this ep has about another month as the feature before i plow into the synth-pop.

that means i need to get these instrumental mixes done within the next month. everything has slowed down so dramatically this year; i'm kind of irked, but them are the apples. i just hope the gear co-operates soon and stays co-operative....

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrisampled

belated, intentionally

hi.

a birthday call shouldn't be a negative experience, so i decided against it this year. i mean, the idea is not to torment you, it's to wish you well. freaking you out would be rather counter-intuitive.

but, i did want to let you know that i didn't forget. i just decided against it.

so, happy birthday.

j

see, this is how you'd assume it should work. it should merge at the master and go through the rest of the chain as one signal.

but, i seem to have disproven this. and, i have further evidence for disproving this - it's helping me explain something i never really understood.

if you place a vanilla bus right in front of the main mix, you'd think it should just be superfluous, because the main mix is combining everything, anyways. it's a virtual path, so you're not creating resistance or any kind of degradation.

but, every time i've done this i've noticed it isn't accurate. sometimes it's subtle. but parking that vanilla bus in there predictably changes the characteristic of the sound. i've never understood this...

...but perhaps the reason this is true is that it actually creates the merge operation that it seems obvious should be there but doesn't seem to actually be.

what that means is that if somebody wants the behaviour in this diagram, they should put a bus in front of the master out and send everything through it. that will merge the signals.

otherwise, this diagram should really be in parallel - at least up to the channel fader (which is right after the eq).

i've convinced myself that what was broken in the drivers was the separation of the tracks. the more i explore this, the more likely it is that it's going to start looking random.

i can't verify that cubase processes individual tracks before it mixes them, but it seems like an unavoidable conclusion.

it would then have to be that it broke at the mixing stage - that the tracks were corrupted as they were being combined, on a stream-by-stream basis.

this should be at the driver level, because it's what drivers do: they act between hardware and software instructions.

i'm still a little unclear on exactly how this works, but the inference is that the hardware must be streaming the individual parts separately; that the "mixing" isn't actually done in hardware, but in the listener's ears. like an rgb gun, or a computer monitor for that matter - it shoots out the different colours independently and allows the result to exist in observation. there's no violet inside your computer. there's only instructions on how to create violet on your screen.

if i can verify that this is true, i'll be convinced.

but, i don't think it's going to help a lot in reconstructing it. it means i'd have to run independent processes on each of the tracks, because the corruption is happening on the other side of the master effects.

so, today wasn't a loss. i feel i finally *understand* what's happening. that should help me put it behind me and move on.

talk about a weird error, though. no wonder i couldn't figure it out.

to keep to the colour analogy, i guess it would be sort of like that i had a dirty printer head, and i was getting splotches on the paper as a consequence of it - those splotches being strange frequency boosts.

i can't make sense of this. i'm starting to understand the tonal differences a little better, but it really makes no less sense to me as to how i ended up where i am.

the guitars null flat. there's some bleed, but it's from the bass part, as it was transferred from tape. tapes bleed. it's not an incomplete null, it's bleed. that's settled.

i can get the drums to very nearly null. i need to cut the eq on them by about 2 db at 50 hz, then boost the master eq by about 2 db at 80 hz. there's an izotope plugin on the master, and it comes in before the eq in the signal path, so that 80 hz boost has to be where it is and that 50 hz cut has to be where it is. i can't say to myself "maybe i split the difference and forgot". they're not interchangeable. in order for it to null, i have to cut the bass into izotope, and increase it out of izotope.

but, of course, anything i do to the master will affect the guitars. then, they no longer null. nor can i say "maybe i cut the guitars before they got to izotope". it doesn't work like that when you've got a plugin in the way.

this suggests two distinct signal paths in the earlier mix. but, i don't mix like that. i've never mixed like that. i'd never do that.

see, the funny thing about this is that it's an entirely rational mixing decision. you might decide the bass is coming in to the mix a little too heavy, take it down and then increase it on the way out. i don't remember doing that here. but i've done this countless times. it's a pretty normal mixing strategy. it doesn't seem like a random error. it seems like there's a fucker at a mixing desk.

i'm still convinced this is crazy. it's the kind of thing i'll never actually believe. i'll disconnect the internet. i'll rant about it all day. but, it's insane.

i'm the kind of person that would think i hallucinated it if god herself came down and slapped me upside the head. i could have a bruise. i'd think i fell somewhere. there's certain things that no amount of evidence can be convincing of. it's a sort of problem with being a cold rationalist. even if it's true, i can't accept it.

yet, i've determined that the old mix somehow sent the guitars and drums through different izotope instantiations, because there was a slight bass boost on one of them and no bass boost on the other - and the probability that this could have cancelled out any other way is so negligible it can't be seriously entertained.

my brain is unable to interpret that as a broken clock, because i can null with what i could call "elementary mixing operations". once a mathematician, always a mathematician. a 2 db boost at 80 hz is a common operation. a 2 db cut at 50 hz is a common operation. a broken clock would create the messy and random complications i was hearing, not uniform cuts at widely used frequencies - that in some sense cancel each other out.

i think, at this point, there's nothing of further value to be gained by trying to null these files. i'm going to shift the focus to determining if the device is currently consistent and flat. if i can prove this, i'll then go back to mixing it from scratch.

let be me clear on the following point: i cannot use mixes that i cannot recreate. whatever the cause, these mixes are useless to me.

see, what's weird is that, on closer analysis, the guitars are actually nulling. which indicates that the file that's outputted is not actually a clean render. i don't know how to make sense of that. did i render a mix without saving it? i have no recollection of this, and it's very uncharacteristic of me. but it's just about the only thing that makes any sense.

well...i suppose that the corruption in the device may have been bus related. but i think that's kind of stretching it.

dropping this external mixing hypothesis is proving difficult. if i can create a mix that nulls without modifying the master volume or eq, i'm left with a head-scratching paradox. but, that seems to be exactly what i'm in the process of doing.

even this doesn't make sense. the file save date on the project is june 29. the render is dated at basically the same time. there's no space for shenanigans. and these aren't things you can easily fake.

but, if this corruption on the bus is a real thing, what i may be doing is manually reconstructing it. i could have output the file through these corrupt buses, which could be the cause of the warped output.

i suppose that would reduce the initial issue to a cubase problem. it seems remote, but i can't argue with the obvious.

more testing is required.

i can't prove there was actually a driver problem until i wiped the registry. there was some other unknown problem before that.

rap news 34

mostly spot on. the way this works is like this:

0) people like donald trump write trade treaties like nafta.
1) nafta allows a us factory to move from arizona to mexico, where it can pay workers a third of the price.
2) the workers at that factory lose their job.
3) the factory blows up the local economy in that region of mexico, forcing the locals into poverty.
4) that sets off a chain reaction of migration that pushes people out of mexico and into the united states, partially because
5) sub minimum wage pay in arizona is still more lucrative than work in mexico.
6) this benefits producers that create products for export but it reduces the pool of possible labour opportunities in arizona, creating structural unemployment levels.
7) what low education white arizonans are able to physically see and intuitively understand is that illegal mexican immigrants have jobs and they don't.
8) donald trump (carefully avoiding neatly shaved mustaches) stands up and blames it all on zee mexicans, in an attempt to generate a political base and distract from his own guilt and responsibility. mass unemployment creates social unrest that needs to be controlled.
9) the media agrees, in an attempt to construct a subscription viewer/reader base and further control the social unrest.
10) low education white arizonans vote for donald trump, but they do not expect him to reverse the policies that set off the chain of reactions.

it's a bit of a stretch to suggest it was planned from the start. but power has a tendency to perpetuate itself by profiting from it's own crises.