the time machine (vst mix) (third correction)

written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 28, 2014 and updated on july 4, 2014 to fix a minor error in transcription.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/vst-mix-2

the time machine (soundblaster mix) (final mix)

this is a primitive mix, built up in noteworthy, that suffers from a slightly blurry drum sound due to everything being run through channel 10 in the soundcard synthesizer. specifically, i'd like to turn the snare down (because it blurs the toms) but it doesn't seem to be possible to do this. obviously, i've fixed this as i built more sophisticated mixes of the track. however, this is what the track sounded like on playback as i was actually arranging it....

written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in mid june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 23, 2014 and updated on july 4, 2014 to fix a minor error in transcription.

formatting this thing is really just a guess, but i can't figure out why else the corruption would be so random. the way i figure it is that either:

1) it goes looking for file blah.wav and finds a half dozen entries, then spits back something mangled.

2) that part of the drive is really badly fragmented, and it's not able to put the files together in real time without stuttering.

either way, i figure it can't hurt, but i'm going to need to copy the files off, format, scan, copy back and then defragment.

that'll likely take me to the end of the day. argh. but i don't want to lose the vst mix when i start redoing the new one.

i think something i can check is to see if it's doing the same thing from the other drive or not.

i'm actually going to right up and format the thing to clean out the partition table...

nope. now it's screwing up with other plugins, too.

i'm going to try a scandisk/defrag. this drive gets massive amounts of data copied to and from it. it almost sounds like it's getting confused with pointers. and, i keep creating and deleting files with the same name, so it's not off the wall.

i'm just going to back up first, though, because i already lost one drive of this type. the four drives are of the same type and age.

on second thought, it only happens when i copy the directory.

which is necessary.

it's gotta be some kind of screw up in memory management or something. i'm still blaming bandstand, but i don't think reinstalling will fix it. i'm going to try to copy first, then freeze. i suspect that will work.

.....aaaaaand, it turns out it was a plugin after all. the same skips were coming back, but turning off bandstand did it.

it's too bad this is the only general track 10 plugin i'm aware of because it's not the bestest. it was working before, so i see no reason to think a reinstall won't work.

but, fuck.

i actually have another hypothesis.

cubase seems to want to keep track of files when they're copied out of the directories. it may have gotten confused when i copied it over to the external drive. that would explain why they were both acting funny, and refreezing worked to get around it.

anyways, i'll be reuploading as soon as the a/b test has convinced me the files are the same, except for the Gb.

hrmmn.

turns out the file was corrupt, after all. the chopping went away by unfreezing and refreezing.

weird. wondering if it's the hard drive, now...

it's resolvable, no use in worrying about it.

i just want to clarify because people are going to say that doesn't make any sense, but it does. we're taught that ram disappears on a reboot, but it doesn't actually. it's just discarded and written over. reusing the information in ram just means going back to where it was and finding it.

so, all the os has to do to reuse the boot information in ram is make sure it never writes in the sector that it assigns for boot.

but, again, it's the cpu cache i'm hypothesizing about...

lol. this is actually a debate all over the internet.

from what i remember from vista support, modern versions of windows actually don't clear anything on a restart unless you force it to. i mean, it's not like it ever really *cleared* it anyways, it just deallocated it. there's a switch of some sort that can actually set everything to all 0s, and it can add several minutes to the rebooting time.

but, if you think about it for a minute, it's just a waste of cycles to rewrite everything on every boot. this is actually the reason that windows is faster on startup than it used to be - it actually doesn't push everything into ram on every boot-up like they teach you in your hardware class, it cuts out a space of ram and leaves it there for future use.

but i'm not sure if that applies to the last versions of xp or not. i'm running xp on modern hardware, so it's very fast on bootup and hard to really tell.

but, this is more to do with ram than cpu cache, and i don't think i'm having a ram issue.

well, the notes are fixed but now the output is stuttering.

it doesn't seem to be drivers, because it stutters at the same spots through multiple sound cards. and, the last track i was working on is also stuttering, so it doesn't seem to be the file, either. i reinstalled cubase to no avail. it might be a plugin, but it actually renders fine in quick mode so that doesn't really make sense. i think i've unfortunately actually reduced it to a processor issue, which is going to be very bad news if it becomes a serious problem.

for now, i'm going to leave the machine off for a bit, eat breakfast and try it again. i don't turn the machine off very often. it doesn't seem like it's overheating, but maybe it just needs a rest.

sending it out through a canned out isn't really a solution. i can hear the difference.

the thing is that this shouldn't really be a load issue. everything's frozen, and it was working fine before. i haven't touched anything. if it's overheating, it would have to be environmental. but it's not warm in here.

unfortunately, fighting with computers is part of being an electronic musician....

i don't really want to reinstall. i couldn't imagine what could have broken besides maybe a soundcard conflict. but i can't see how/why.

the one thing i can say i did was copy a large file over to an external drive, and that xp update has made the process slow. maybe the cache was jumbled up or something. i think that requires a hard rather than soft reset?

whatever. eat, then worry about it.