Funny thing happened yesterday and today, and I thought I’d post about it, just in case it would be of interest to anyone. Bear with me, this is kind of long.
I’m running Windows 10 on a 2 year old workstation with pretty fair specs. So, the night before yesterday there was this huge Windows update waiting as I was closing down. So I chose the “update and shutdown” option and went to bed. The next day I had to wait like half an hour on boot up while the Windows update apparently needed to perform its final whatever. Then at first all seemed normal. Sound and everything was working normally. But when I started Cubase 9.5, it initiated some installation and froze there. Had to kill the process. Didn’t say what it was trying to install. But eventually I found that it must be the Yamaha Steinberg USB driver for my UR44 audio interface. Which was odd, as it was apparently working for the rest of the system. Sound was playing ok in all other applications, but Cubase still wouldn’t start, insisting on plopping up this installation that it couldn’t perform.
So I found this new beta 1.10.0.4 USB driver that was released, apparently to fix some audio dropout issues (that I can’t say I’ve been suffering from) and decided to try it out. All said and done, and lo and behold - Cubase decided it was happy with this driver as well and started without a hitch. Great! End of story, right? Wrong! 
So this evening I was just surfing the web for luls, and found that the vids I played were somehow sounding pitched. They were low, at least a semitone or more. It was consistent too, all over. Youtube, news channels, even Soundcloud as I checked out some of my own stuff up there. Really weird! Every video I played seemingly was playing slower to make the sound come out a semitone below actual pitch. And it was the same phenomenon system wide, regardless of the application used. VLC media player, iTunes and even Windows own builtin sounds were pitched low. And I was NOT smoking anything, even though I do confess to kind of doubted my senses there for a while!
Well, then I remembered that I also downloaded a firmware update for the UR44 yesterday that I hadn’t installed yet. So I did install it, upgrading the unit from 2.11 to 2.12. And after that installation completed, everything magically reset to normal speed again. No reboot in between, just the f/w update. So it seems, the UR44 was somehow internally lowering the pitch of all of the sound it was processing? Anyone even hear of something like that? Gives me the creeps that something like that could even be a possibility!
Well, there you have it. Make of it what you will but it’s a true story.
Regards,
Jana