Wednesday, August 12, 2015

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.