Slashdot Mirror

Creative Labs has that reputation, and they were dicks in general but funnily I had some real "audiophile" sound with Sound Blaster Live! and Audigy 1 cards.

Creative drivers were shit and I was even once stranded - I needed to download a CD image from unofficial source to get sound under Windows, whereas finding and using the DOS driver took me minutes (!). But a russian guy made a great driver that always worked and is perfect if you only care about getting an output (so no EAX gaming shit) and even the latency is low I think. It's still here http://www.kxproject.com/
One weird property of Live/Audigy cards is the output for rear speakers has better DAC and signal path, rated at 107dB signal/noise. The driver swaps front and rear speaker output by default. Sound quality was really fscking perfect as far as any regular usage is concerned. Now I have a Xonar DX which is much better (116dB SNR) but it feels like just the same and my sound is worse because I'm using it in a smaller, worse room.

So, to get cheap ass audiophile sound, old Live! and Audigy 1 are or were great. I would buy them for a pittance. Killed a great many of them though, they're easy to kill when you put them in another PC (be very careful and always fasten the screw even if you're thinking of running it temporarily unscrewed while setting up your PC hardware)

There are alternatives to Creative's bloatware.

Also, it appears that you forgot the "I" at the beginning of your sentence. Every sentence needs a subject!

that you can ditch the water skimmer and then get stuck after playing for 20min and finding a point where you need it but cant go back to get it

God damn! You, too? That pissed me off so bad. I actually got all the way to the ramp attached to the elevator with pulley cables and washing machine puzzle before I got stuck and it said, "A.I Disabled" after screwing around for a while trying to figure something out. It appeared no matter what game I loaded from there on, even if I started a new game. Backing up the savegames and reinstalling did the trick, though. After starting a new game from that chapter, I had a pretty big smack on the forehead after I saw the swamp boat RIGHT THERE! Did I actually miss that?

I was having too much fun in the beginning of the game to think about the tedium of walking the super long distances to get there. I assumed I just broke the game, because that appears to be something I do a lot. I've broken Painkiller, Star Trek: Elite Force 2, Ultima 7 (not hard to do, but I didn't do anything wrong) and Strife to a point where I can't continue in the game. Plus, I sooner assumed the helicopter and radiation sewage crap was just an obnoxious point in the game rather than needing a special tool to get past it (think really unfair games, like Contra Adventure where there's three hard bosses in a row). I had already spent a half-hour trying to play lumberjack with the blue plastic drums getting past the first radiation pool.

If you ever need a playtester, I'm your guy, as I seem to be really good at breaking software :)

As for the stuttering, I'm pissed that I had to switch back from my kX Project Drivers on my SBLive! Value back to the mediocre (but reliable) official drivers. I hope any fixes that come out will remedy it.

God, finally someone who sees Creative exactly the way I do. Nothing Creative has created has been special ever since they entered the PCI sound card market by buying Ensoniq and re-labeling their cards. Whatever you may be able to say in defense of their hardware, the fact still remains that their tech support and overall customer relations are a joke, as are their drivers and other supporting software. Absolutely the ONLY thing Creative has over anyone else is EAX, and EAX won't save Creative any more than Glide saved 3dfx or any more than nVidia's refusing to conform to the standard DirectX 9 shader rendering path will save it. Why the hell won't these companies learn that you can't retain dominance over their niche of the hardware market by strongarming software developers into using their proprietary technologies?

OpenAL is kind of a joke too, from the looks of it, as it seems to be largely controlled by nVidia and Creative.

I should mention that I have an Audigy 2, but that I use the kX Project drivers http://www.kxproject.com/ instead of the official Creative ones because I can have direct control over what's going on in the DSP on the card. If it wasn't for kX, I'd probably have an nForce motherboard like my roommate (AC3-encoded 5.1 output anyone?).

Get a low-cost Audigy LS, and split all the ports. I'm betting one could use the kX Project drivers to output a different song on each channel.

Load encrypted file, Verify Rights, Decrypt Audio Stream, send result to sound card which saves it straight to Wav, MP3, or Ogg. Thank you very much.

You can do this exact thing in the free KX project emu10k1 drivers, if you have an emu10k1 sound card (like EMU Aps, Creative Sound Blaster Live/Audigy), by connecting a virtual patch cable from the WAV play lines to the WAV record lines. You can even record decoded surround sound from applications, or all channels of a game's audio, if you have a multichannel ASIO recording program.

Have you tried Acid Pro 4? The latest patch level seems to run pretty well with VST instruments (4.0b right now). Don't use Win9x, ME, or XP. You need Windows 2000. Also, if you're using a Creative Labs or EMU APS sound card, you NEED the kX project drivers. With the kx driver, Windows 2000, Acid Pro 4, and two or three softsynths, I can get down to 5ms latency on my Athlon XP1800+. It helps if you turn off all the user interface effects in Windows, like scrolling and fading menus, mouse shadow (if possible), smooth scrolling, etc. as the GDI stupidly runs at a higher priority than the applications themselves. So, when you open a menu, the softsynths will buzz and/or skip.

Another cool thing about Acid 4 is the ability to use odd time signatures. Sure, you could make a 5:4 song on a 4:4 grid, but proper grid snapping makes laying out the song a whole lot easier. I just finished a 5:4 jungle-ish track in Acid. Very cool stuff.

You might be able to find Acid Pro 4 for as cheap as $160 in a music or guitar magazine. I paid $200 from Sonic Foundry's web site. The SF price is a bit higher now.

Finally, if you make movies too, the 5.1 plugin is the cheapest Dolby Digital encoder available (I got it also for $200, up to $250 or so now). All other DD encoders I've found were at least $800-$1200.

I certainly agree on that much, kinda...
I have never liked Creative, they're as M$ sa sound hardware can be. But on the other hand I have been quite impressed by the Audigy I picked up. I wanted to get a MontegoII, but couldn't get one across here (UK), so in the end I caved and picked up the Audigy instead (I needed a replacement second soundcard since my 128 with the Yamaha GX daughterboard died, for mixing and music purposes) and the sound quality is the best I've heard yet. Given I'm pumping my soundcards (Live and Audigy) through a mixing desk and good quality 100watt amp, quality all the way through is fairly important, especially when recording the output to get a mix. So on that front I think i'll probably get round to replacing the Live with an Audigy 2, since the Live is noticably worse than the Audigy, and is now essentially my bottleneck.
Also, the EAX advanced is quite nice in gaming. The games it works with (Mafia, SOFII among others) sound beautiful. Mafia it makes souns remarkably like you are driving through a town, helped by the superb sound work that went into said game. The acclusion programming gives it a great help (nice smooth transitions between say outdoors and driving into a warehouse with echos that sound right, also noticable in GTA3), and SOFII it gives similarly great effects to. It just adds that bit extra to a good game. Playing it with e volume up really high you really do notice it. A friend of mine who came over to play SOFII, he'd played it on his machine with a Live, was blown away by the sound quality and effects.
Also it can finally support Aureal A3D, which I have to use in iL2Sturmovik, since for some reason it doesn't like using EAXAdvanced (although I will retry it since I've just reinstalled with the latest drivers, and patched iL2 to it's latest version).

All in all, if your machine can get on with it, it's a great card, but Creative and their support suck so bad that it's a bit of a minefield whether it'll work.
I am aware that there's a team who made a third party driver for the Audigy, the kxproject. Whether it can now support EAX however I'm not sure of since I ended up not having to use it. But it's worth taking a look at.

If you want to do MIDI, then Reason is pretty good, though you should be able to get away with any program that has VST Instrument support (like Logic, Cubase, Nuendo). As far as I remember Reason doesn't have VST support. It's good to get a program that uses an open plugin standard, because then you aren't locked into one vendor to expand your sounds. There are lots of free VST instruments around, and plenty to buy.

If you get an SB Live! then you'll probably want to get the (free, but not open source) low-latency ASIO drivers from KX Project . I get 5ms latency from a $30 sound card, which is amazing.

Also, check out my collection of quality GPL VST plugins: destroyfx.org . (These are mostly plugins for modifying sound in-line, not generating it from midi keypresses.)