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Creative Goes After Driver Modder
FreedomFighter writes "Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being 'Vista Ready'. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."
Creative doing something dumb is a shock? They haven't done anything intelligent in nearly decade.
Used to be I would buy ONLY Creative sound hardware. Now I've given up after even a USB sound box of theirs didn't work, but the $15 Taiwanese ugly grey box worked fabulously with no effort, and on Linux, too.
Now they not only refuse to release decent drivers, but actively annoy those who do. What, exactly, is the value proposition here for me as a customer?
expandfairuse.org
Well done Creative. You've universally upset users, upset developers and made yourself look like petulant asshats. Did you get your panties in a bunch because a lone hacker with a binary patcher could produce better drivers than your clearly mediocre driver developers?
Well your drivers always sucked and your hardware business is being steadily eaten by rapidly improving onboard audio and much better high end audio cards. You are not long for this world.
Modifying your own driver for compatibility reasons is perfectly legal in most jurisdictions, though distributing the modified driver may not be.
And surely a diff is not a derived work in itself - is it?
Because Scruffy fails to believe in this company. *sob*
Creative blows these days. I too used to be a Creative goon, buying nothing but their cards for any of my many boxxen. After one too many fried - after one too many asinine issues with their crap drivers, and even crappier software (it didn't used to be this way - what the hell happened?!)... Well, I'll take onboard sound over a dedicated Creative soundcard any day.
Seriously, Creative went from awesome to shit. What happened? I still haven't figured that out.
Shamelessly stolen from bash.org
:: later ::
<booradley> I'd like to perform a one act play I call, "Creative screwed me like a bitch"
<booradley> <audigy> Buy me! I'm ever so sexy
<booradley> <boo> ok. come home with me and we'll play among the stars
<booradley> <audigy> tee hee! I love you, boo!
<booradley> <boo> I love you too, audigy
<booradley>
<booradley> <boo> there, you're all installed. how do you feel?
<neshura> down in front!
<booradley> <audigy> LET JESUS FUCK YOU! VRAAAGH!
* audience gasps.
<booradley> * audigy is putting noise across your PCI channels
<booradley> <hard drive> Mein leben!
<booradley> * hard drive has died
<booradley> <audigy> Blaaah! blaaaugh! your mother sucks cocks in hell! graaagh!
<booradley> <modem> aaieee
<booradley> *modem has died
<booradley> and the new modem I got connects at 32k tops
<Shendal> By far, that's the best one-act IRC play I've read this season. Do I smell a Tony award?
From how I read the post, Creative licensed code from third parties only for XP, not Vista. Since this code is needed to use certain functionality, this functionality is disabled on Vista. In other words, Creative's bad negotiating comes to bite their customers in the ass. How could they be this stupid -- "oh, we only licensed this stuff for Windows XP? Too bad, let the customers suck it up"
Creative is loosing lots of customers with their X-FI series,drivers sucks,no support for linux....I had one X-FI Currently i'm selling my sound card which cost me 250 when it was released to use my onboard sound which works flawlessly in linux ,windows,Hackintosh you name it.
On the other hand dumb people deserve to be ripped off. They call it 'evolution'.
This is pure ridiculous. It would be understandable if Creative promised to make drivers available... But don't leave the end-user with no options, then try 'take down' usermade drivers that fix the crippled feature. I don't know if the drivers are open source or not, but either way, gOgO gAdgEt tOrrEnt trAckEr!
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
hmm.
that really does seem a little petulant and/or puerile.
a more enlightented company might of examined what he did to see why it worked.
a more customer focused company might of actually listened to their customer complaints in the first place.
and a company with a serious long term investments in this technology might of actually installed some QA systems and ensured the drivers were fit for purpose in the first place.
there seems to be no effort, willing or investment from Creative at this point.
and, wheras there is some truth to Creative protecting their IP, and beign disgruntled about anybody else possibly releasing unsupported patched, I believe Daniel_K summed it up quite eloquently on his response. "The funny thing is that you are faster "protecting" your technologies and intellectual properties than providing improved drivers and softwares for your customers."
From the useless forum thread, it looks like one cowboy decided to make things easy for users suffering from Creative's ineptitude. As noble as his motives are, his methods weren't exactly legal. Looks like he was redistributing altered binary packages and asking for donations for his effort and time. I understand he was trying to help users but again his methods (and not his motives) are suspect. If Creative had any brains, they would probably hire the guy (daniel_k) as a contractor, get his contributions in, pay him a few Euro (or Yen or anything but the US$) and check that stuff into their CVS and call it their own.
This is what happens when non-technical management + legal team + marketing get together to make decisions (and it's not just Creative...). I've been using a Creative Soundblaster 5.1 Live for the last 7 years - the card cost me 25$ and I've spent over 2000$ in AGP / PCI-Express cards in the same time. I am not much of an audiophile and the card just plain bloody works. Creative makes great hardware - the whining on that forum was driver support for Microsoft Vista but that's another nightmare story...
We, at Creative, are unable to mass produce chips that differentiates themselves by its design as we used to do. A few years ago we throw all of our money making a single chip design and our bussines since then has been to ship it with a simple eeprom saying what version of our card had you bought, and enable/disable features only at driver level. So please please please stop hacking our drivers to allow the advanced functionalities work in the low level cards, because in that way nobody will buy our multihundred bucks cards.
Sincerely yours.
Same thing happened with Win2K/Windows XP on the Live! cards. Creative never bothered to issue working drivers for the cards or the LiveDrive that allowed use of all the features, and the KX Project happened. It's pretty simple, don't bother with their hardware, the most compatible thing they ever produced was the SoundBlaster 16 and everything from there has been a support nightmare.
When I saw "goes after" in the headline, I assumed it meant they hired the guy after realising he was better than their in-house programmers. How naive and foolish of me.
From what I just read he was restoring XP functionality which (I assume) would break the protected path and lead to Creative themselves getting in the shit for it.
But its just corporate bullshit, I would have personally hired him in a big fanfare and gotten good publicity.
liqbase
... as an idiot-proof installer and let users download the drivers themselves, like the patcher which generates the ATI Mobility Radeon drivers from the normal ATI Radeon drivers (see here). This would probably be legal in most country with the inevitable exception of the US, but even then their complaint would be weaker as he's not distributing their IP.
The forum thread is interesting because it's full of irate users lambasting Creative for their drivers and their attitude towards "Daniel_K". However, how many of them are that upset that they will stop purchasing Creative products? We can bitch and moan all we like but if we/they/people continue to buy Creative's products regardless of how rubbish they are, regardless of buggy, feature crippled drivers and regardless of their attitudes towards their customers, they're going to think they have the prerogative to continue in this fashion.
I, for one, bought an X-Fi sound card. Buggy drivers and constant issues regarding gaming made me put it away. Reading that this was a common issue across the board made me decide not to buy Creative again. There ARE alternatives out there. Cheaper, better quality alternatives. Just for example, I replaced my X-Fi with an HT Omega Claro. http://www.htomega.com/index.html
I'm never buying Creative again after how poor their drivers on Vista have been. The Creative 5.1 drivers have a huge memory overflow in them which causes the Windows Audio Service to need to be restarted every few hours or you'll suffer though huge amounts of audio distortion...
So I upgraded to their latest card in the hopes that their latest drivers might fix things. I picked out a X-Fi Audio Extreme, and this is only recently mind you...
And although the memory leak seems to have gone this card has the highly entertaining bug of turning down the master volume by 75% each time any input is received on the microphone, in use or others. A wonderful feature you can't turn off. So if I type too loud on the keyboard my music turns down by 75%...
Long story short... I gently unscrewed my Creative X-Fi and throw it against a wall. Then I plugged in to my Gigabyte motherboard's built in audio, enabled it in the bios, and haven't had any audio issues at all for coming up to two months now.
I'm not using Creative again. I'm done. Seven years a happy customer, now gone.
Indeed. Instead, they bought two of the finest synthesizer and sampler vendors and sent them down the drain.
This, Creative, I will never forget. And for this simple reason you won't sell anything to me. Never.
Yes, even if you shipped it with Linux drivers...
This was essentially the first thing I thought of when I read the article (I know, I know...) You had me up until the part where he was asking for donations for the drivers he was releasing. That seems more the crux of the issue, rather than he is releasing the drivers at all. The wording does indicate that they are upset that he is releasing the drivers, but they also mention the fact that he is requesting donations for them. I wonder if they would have gone after him as hard if he had just quietly released the drivers and not bothered with the donation bit.
Last drivers appeared few days ago for all Windows from XP to vista x64... you haven't even specified to which product your statement applies.
Beside that, I see in my collection that new Vista drivers appeared in October and November 2007, then now in March 2007, which is surely more often than "less than one new driver a year".
What is worst is that people actually buy in your propaganda. One would think that having Creative HW + SW is terrible experience, while truth is quite different. For example, creative drivers provide simple thing as multichannel expansion (2 to 4..7 channels) - unlike most other manufacturers.
Beside, last 3 or 4 batch of drivers were pretty stable for X-fi series.
How did this baseless company bashing get on front page? Pure sensationalism?
The original SoundBlaster was basically a copy of the Adlib (a soundcard by a small American company) with digital output tacked on. Problem was the implementation was so broken it was impossible to play back audio without crackles and pops.
.. or SoundBlaster 512, they had many names for it).
The Soundblaster pro was better, but that's not saying a lot. The fact that the follow up - the Sound Blaster 16 - was NOT Sound Blaster Pro compatible is a clear indication how murky the SB Pro's underpinnings actually were.
Speaking about the SoundBlaster 16. Despite what you may believe the SB16 is NOT a 16-Bit soundcard. It can indeed play back 16-Bit samples, but the drivers simply down converts them to 12-bits.
The AWE was better but it was basically what the SB16 should have been and the competition by this time made the AWE look silly - and that is not mentioning the rather dishonest 64 simultaneous channels claim their marketing department threw about.
Creative's first attempt at a PCI soundcard turned out so murky that 1997 era mobos have something called a "SoundBlaster link" to make them happy. Finally giving up Creative bought another company that had made a PCI soundcard and slapped the SoundBlaster brand on it. (SoundBlaster 16 PCI
The SoundBlaster Live! was not PCI 2.1 complainant. If you somehow didn't know that you had to turn off PCI delayed transactions in the BIOS you would get blue screens every now and then. It also caused disk corruption on Via chipsets. Fun fun fun.
Since then the Live has been rebranded several times. They even spewed out a SoundBlaster Live 24-Bit that did the old SoundBlaster 16-Bit down sampling trick. How nice of them.
The SoundBlaster X-Fi is much nicer than the Live and the Soundcard I'm currently listening to. But beware, Creative is up to their old tricks even here. They talk a lot about their 24-Bit Crysalizer - for instance - but it is actually a 24-Bit Compressor similar to the 16-Bit compressors used by CD mastering studios. Like any audiophile can tell you a compressor helps cheepo speakers by making the sound a little more vivid and louder, at the cost of less fidelity on high end equipment.
Also note that the SoundBlaster X-Fi PCIe Xtreme Audio is not an X-Fi but a good 'ol SoundBlaster Live! in new clothes!
Watch that stock price (CREAF.PK)... I wouldn't be surprised if the VP or other executives had sold some stock earlier in the week. If only the 5 day graphs were available. Already down 3.25% for Friday.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
I remember when I purchased an Audigy 2 from creative and attempted to find the latest drivers online (like any sane person purchasing new hardware). I was shocked to learn that not only did creative not provide any sort of driver downloads for my sound card (at the time) that the forum mods actively forbid anyone from ripping their driver CD and posting it online. I inquired what would happen under a hypothetical situation where I lost my driver cd, I was told that I would have to go to the store I purchased the card from to see if they'd give me a new one. This is just one more example of anti-consumer policy.
I've owned Creative sound cards for years. The only non-Creative sound card I bought was an Aztech sound Galaxy, some years ago; annoyingly it kept losing its config settings over a reboot. It's reasonably easy to verify that the Creative card you're going to buy works on Linux (I've never used Creative's drivers since every PC I've ever owned has run Linux). At the moment I'm using a Creative Labs SB Audigy. However, the machine it's in needs an upgrade (it only has 1GB of RAM, and I want to run virtualised instances of *BSD and other Unixes to make porting software easier).
What sound hardware should I buy for the new machine? My needs are fairly pedestrian apart from the fact that I would like to do high-quality LP transcription occasionally. I will probably also buy a very quiet machine as the upgrade in order to use it as a media PC (and hence need 7.1 support). Since audiophile audio quality and 7.1 are probably more or less incompatible I'm happy to buy two sound cards for the two different purposes, but which to buy?
I've been considering the M-Audio FastTrack Pro (the idea being that I use the device itself for the LP transcription and export SPDIF to an AV amp for the surround stuff). I've heard good things about M-Audio kit. However, it appears not to work with ALSA (yet, at least). What are my other choices?
The PK means the stock is traded off the pink sheets. Companies wind up there, and not on a legitimate exchange like the NASDAQ, because no CPA will sign off on their financial statement.
Must be a real open company.
Just remember Creative, the geeks control the network.
We are the ones that fix computers for friends and relatives. Slashdot readers alone probably account for a good sizable chunk of all your sales ever so what do you think will happen when we stop recommending your brand to the people who don't know any better. Or better yet, say it sucks?
Your company won't be the first to die in the flames of a hoard of angry geeks and you certainly won't be the last.
To arms, slashdotters! I think an invasion of their forums is in order to let these douchebags know what we think of planned obsolescence. Within days the internet will contain uncountable links to the modified drivers and Creative will regret screwing over their customers once too often.
After reading the thread on the Creative forum, I guess that "Daniel_K" re-enabled features for Vista rather than developing them from the ground up. Which leads us to the question why the Vista drivers were shipped in that crippled state. Between the lines of Phil O'Shaughnessy's message I read that it was a "business decision" rather than developer incompetence.
;-)
It is not the first strange decision by Creative either:
While I'm happy with the hardware of the Soundblaster Live! 5.1 I bought a few years ago, even then Creative offered only driver updates for download, where others were more customer-friendly and offered complete drivers. Which is quite helpful if you have mislaid your driver CD-ROM
So I agree that their management is a bunch of asshats. I also agree that onboard audio is getting better. My reason for buying that Soundblaster Live! was abysmal onboard sound on the Abit IC-7 mainboard of the computer. The new rig I built last year has quite acceptable onboard sound, and unless I see a really attractive sound card offer this one will just stick to the onboard sound chip.
C - the footgun of programming languages
after re-reading the entire thread for my amusement, I think this is not a simple case of ineptitude from Creative.
/. community are more aware then others that there is no compelling reason at all why HW from XP should not work on Vista - but there might be commerical reasons why.
after all they have the original source code and we have to assume some partway competant SW engineers.
it seems that some of what Daniel K did was reactivate some features that had been intentionally crippled from older cards.
this seems more to be nefarious decisions on backwards compatibilty and forward roadmap taken on profit grounds not technical grounds. after all, we of the
follow the logic here. a brand new and shiny OS hits the market and you need to release drivers for it. would it not be tempting to cripple some of the older cards and hence try and tease people to upgrade to the latest HW? even better you could hold back some of the features of the later versions and try to gain additional income for them in the form of top range drivers. its an insane tactic but one that is used in the field quite alot.
the bad thing is that somebody then dissassemles that code for the driver realises what has happened and then patches the removed functionality back in.
this tactic is very prevalent in the industry - by attempting to artificially shorten the product life cycle you try to force repeat purchace and then profit. when there are no more additional features you can dream up then you attempt to deprecate the original in order to force purchase of the new. Creatice make no money at all from people using old sound blaster tech on vista so they will do everything they can to halt it.
maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I see this sort of thing all the time and it make a more logical explanation to me then "large multinational cannot write new drivers even when they have the source code".
comments?
I still have an original basic Audigy, bought it a few years ago (for the firewire as much as the sound) when I used Windows. The XP drivers back then stank too, horribly unstable, very tedious to uninstall cleanly (required cleaning registry and also system folders for orphaned .inf files) and I ended up using the alternative kX drivers. It took Creative maybe 6 months to produce useable drivers while simultaneously vigorously claiming nothing was wrong in public. Looks like nothing changed which surprises me (but probably shouldn't). Using Audigy in Linux is fine though, everything works nicely right from distro install. The hardware actually seems very good, and much better for having none of Creative's awful drivers or software along for the ride. They should thank and hire this Daniel_K instead of stomping on him, but I don't think that's the Singapore way.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
The stupidity of some corporate lawyers never ceases to astound me. Surely someone must have told them that for whatever good they hope to get out of such an action, the harm could be far far worse. And as with all corporate actions of mondo ignoramo, the news will be spread far and wide. It's on /. and if it isn't already, it'll be on the front page of digg. Then ars and gizmodo and a thousand other sites.
Now what exactly did Creative have to gain by doing this? Maybe somewhere an unhappy customer who installed these drivers, and for whatever reason, they didn't work or broke something, and that ignorant but well meaning customer blames Creative. Instead what they get is legions of geeks pledging to never knowingly purchase any Creative product ever again. They get a soiled reputation. And finally, they loose the happy customers who were happy only because this guy rewrote the drivers.
If they had half a brain, they would have quietly hired him for a very handsome sum of money. If they didn't try then they deserve whatever backlash they get.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
It appears Creative have joined the ever growing ranks of vendors who don't give a SHIT about their customers.
Luckly we live in a free market, where competitor products are freely available, and so the answer is clear, STOP buying Creative products. Sure they used to be the best around, but that changed long ago.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Where is nvidia's sound storm 2 sound card / chip? Sound storm 1 was a good sound chip and there was talk a few years ago about them working on a new sound chip.
Now that was a kick-ass sound card. Good ol' GUS. Sad now that the on-boards are good enough, all the current stuff sounds great but still doesn't seem as cool as firing up the GUS for the first time.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Years ago, when mainboards were less specialized than today, if the user wanted to play sound he had to purchase an audio card, which usually meant choosing a Creative one or a cheap ultra low quality clone (ALS100 cheapos anyone?).
Today most audio chipsets bundled into PC mainboards are good enough for music and movies, and if the user needs special features like very low latency, high sampling speeds, big word sizes, balanced I/O, etc, the answer will be a professional card, i.e. not a Creative product.
I bought years ago a M-Audio Delta 44, which is good enough for my needs (and works perfectly under Linux); when I'll need a better or more powerful one I'm still not sure what I'll choose between RME, E-MU, MOTU, etc, but certainly Creative will be out of the list.
My point is that their market is shrinking every day a new motherboard comes out with new and better audio capabilities and a high end audio card producer makes a consumer product on the same price level of the typical Creative card.
Pissing off your customers is generally a very bad move for every company, but in this scenario if that silly move backfires it could pretty much destroy Creative.
A long time ago, I bought an isa SB16 and CDROM reader to upgrade my (then) 486. Much later, I was building it back up, and couldn't get hold of my drivers, so I borrowed a set of floppies from a friend, to make a copy. Believe it or else, the disks were copy protected. Some stupid drivers, copy protected ! Like you could use them without the associated hardware !
It's a pitty they swallowed ensoniq and not the other way round. Ensoniq was doing a pretty good job at making good budget sound cards.
At the risk of sounding stupid, I'm wondering why people still buy soundcards. The vast majority of motherboards have some version of AC97 audio on them nowadays. Is there some inherent advantage to SoundBlaster cards over the AC97 audio bundled with most motherboards nowadays?
Is there something I'm missing?
this guy summed it up very nicely:
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=7
"Now the painful truth which half the posts here have missed: the Creative driver team is a group of smart, very talented people who could release a fully funcitoning driver set TOMORROW if company executives would let them. The fact that they have not done so is a strategic marketing decision based on 1. The cost of drafting a license with other IP holders that would cover the card itself for its entire life cycle versus just the card on a particular set of OS's, and 2. The desire to use a new OS as leverage to force customers to upgrade to a new sound card even though the previous card is still fully functional."
it's all about forced obsolescense
I have an audigy 2 ZS right now and the drivers under Vista BITE HARD. EAX and other stuff get disabled if you have more then 3GB or so of ram. I couldn't even install SP1 because creative has not updated the drivers in over a year. The card has mostly been trouble free under linux but I have run into a few issues with it every now and then. It is only because of the drivers that daniel put out that I could update to SP1 which did fix some issues.
.... drivers that work.
The newest alsa version added support for the CMI8788 cards which includes the Xonar. I am planning on picking up a Xonar D2X and then not having to worry about this stuff anymore. The Xonar even has a nice DTS out so you can take a feed directly off the card and plug it into your receiver/decoder etc. Based on what I Have read on it the Xonar and other CMI8788 cards certainly have the Creative cards beat in the most important ways
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I had an original Audigy, purchased for a pre-XP operating system. When they finally did come up with drivers for XP, they required users to download an ISO from Compaq of all places, extract the files, then modify a couple of files so that it wouldn't look for the Compaq identifiers (whatever they were -- I don't recall). In these days, dial-up was still prevalent (I was on a cablemodem at the time), and the image was more than 300MB, and engendered often angry -- and mysteriously deleted -- postings on their forum.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Poor to mediocre hardware, buggy drivers, patent-trolling, not only giving shit about customers, but punishing them for trying to improve the situation. Their real sin was to destroy Ensoniq and Aureal, which were lightyears ahead both in technology and customer care. Creative's death is inevitable, since AC97 onboard chips are killing their marketshare. Unfortunately, this means they will mutate into yet another patent troll that produces absolutely nothing. They have killed progress in PC audio, will continue to kill it.
Please, Creative, just vanish.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Why don't all the Creative owners with defective drivers just launch a class action lawsuit? From what I've read it seems that their product doesn't function as they advertised it would - and they knew it wouldn't. In fact I'd think there would be a few Attorneys General interested too?
I've been following this issue since Creative first removed the links, and two things stood out to me as very good reasons Creative would have to remove links to his stuff.
1) He was taking donations for his work. This gets sketchy because he wasn't hosting anything, all of the money went straight in to his pocket
2) One of the packages he was distributing was a version of Alchemy (Creative's DS3D->OpenAL wrapper) called Universal Alchemy. Alchemy is a product that Creative sells (free w/X-Fi's however), it's my understanding he somehow removed the DRM from one of their releases as part of the Universal Alchemy package. This would basically be pirated software.
Of course Creative is Creative, so the situation has been handled with their usual degree of overreacting, but at the same time it seems to me that they'd have some good reasons to stop letting this guy's software be listed on their forums. As far as I know he hasn't even been asked/told to stop developing the software, only that he's not welcome to advertise it on Creative's forums.
Frankly this comes off to me more as the users getting their panties tied up in a knot over Creative moderating their forum, than any real concerns about the technical issues. Creative's forums can be a bit wild at times thanks to the seemingly endless supply of Creative haters and the trolls they evolve in to.
More precisely, if I PAID for hardware that I expect to be functioning properly, if correctly-functioning drivers were supposed to be included in that price, and if the vendor doesn't provide valid drivers themselves, then who the heck are they to say people can't fix the problems on their own?
What next? Cars that you aren't allowed to fix yourself? Yes, there are warranty issues, but damn the warranty if it is the difference between functionality and being left with a non-functional piece of expensive junk. That's a consumer's call, not the vendor's (although the vendor has no obligation to fix things if the consumer takes things into their own hands -- that's fair).
Alternatively, if Creative can't stand the possibility of other people fixing their problems for them then the right thing to do would be for consumers to return the product as defective and launch a class-action lawsuit to test the claim that their products really were "Vista Ready".
When pc's didnt come with soundcards (remember that) I looked at soundcards, and trust me i didnt end up with a creative product. That pc eventualy died and I happly moved to on board sound from the motherboard and i have never looked back.
Reading through this /. article i now understand why i was never a client of creative. There are 'hifi' nerds - you know the type who fall for gold connections in wires. Funny shapes of plastic that 'improve' the sound in a room. Maybe my hearing is basic but while its nice to sell some hifi nerd a $1000 cable can anybody really tell the difference ?
A sound card is a waste of money for most people these days unless you have special requirement.
I have been using MB digital outputs to Denon receiver for about 5 years now (since my first Nforce MB). I will never buy another sound card. Pointless waste of money.
I see no sense at all buy an expensive sound card and expensive computer speakers to go with it. Stick with MB sounds and buy a receiver and real speakers for about the same price.
If you really want to cheap out, buy some inexpensive speakers and hook them up to the MB analog outs. It is not that bad for the price.
Available options besides hacking the darn driver:
- 1. Don't use Vista.
- 2. Don't buy creative
- 3. Don't do either
Plenty of options... I'd be inclined towards option 3.Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Ok, that does it. I'd love to ditch Creative, but what alternatives are there? Are there any cards out there that run well under both XP and Linux? And, dare I ask, Vista?
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
I understand the desire to sell more hardware to allow users to 'upgrade' but this just reaks. I hope this story gets a lot of media attention.
I think the problem for Creative is that AC'97 and it's successor all but destroyed their business.
They can no longer count on new PC sales as an avenue of revenue because built in motherboard solutions are "good enough" for most people. So better to burn the bridges of existing owners and hope they are forced to repurchase something they didn't need. More power to you Asus but why did you have to name your card Xonar? Ugh.
How things have not changed since then :-(
In Europe I have bought Terratec (German company) sound cards and they are fantastic. They use the same chipsets than M-Audio and the quality of the sound is amazing. They also do very high quality TV cards.
Moreover, they are open source developers friendly. Actually, after I bought the Terratec 7.1 card, I contacted them to get the spec documentation, so that it could be used for ALSA drivers. They very kindly sent me the documentation, without any problem, which I passed to ALSA devs. And since then, we have Terratec drivers for Linux.
Step 1: Do the bare minimum to get XP drivers to run on Windows.
Step 2: Have some third party get the rest of the features working for free.
Step 3: Ban the third party's work.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!
I had never heard of these drivers before creative got all dumb fuck on them. Fortunately, they have just shot themselves in the foot and now everybody will here about them and get them from other locations. Here is a torrent of the Daniel_k Drivers: http://isohunt.com/release/122458
Hey, many people can say that they need advance audio features in a special card, and that's cool and all, but the other 100 million users have tiny little speakers and now that laptops are outselling desktops, sound cards are moot. The cheap-ass sound chips that embedded in motherboards or build into laptops are what most all people are going to use.
Creative sucks, they always have, their drivers have sucked and their support sucks and this is just a little more public proof. If they were smart, (and they are not) they'd give the guy a grant and slap a disclaimer on his work. He is "selling" their product for them. He is allowing people to use their products who otherwise wouldn't or couldn't. Stopping such support just, again, shows how much they suck and how stupid they are.
Kinda OT: I'm looking for a good gaming sound card. My on-board one is a joke, and while I'm currently using a lower-end Creative card, I would like to get something better. I read about the problems with Creative in the comments on Newegg for their current offerings, but I didn't see anything else that really stood out. That said, does anyone have any recommendations for a good gaming sound card, ideally one that supports as many as possible of the modern acceleration features? Thank you.
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
I've just been reading the Creative boards and I'm foaming at the mouth with incandescent rage. Creative's actions are nothing short of criminal in intentionally crippling their devices to force unnecessary upgrades. Death to this company. Scum. Total, utter scum.
While they legally had a right to do this, most people's anger comes from the fact that Creative has had crappy Vista drivers, without fix, for a while now. And then the person who actually fixed it is getting shunned, and people can't download the fixed drivers anymore.
This is the problem with large companies. When they're small, they have no choice but to treat their customers like royalty -- otherwise they fail. But when they're large and have a lot of money, they don't care anymore, because they're already successful.
This is on reddit, Slashdot, and likely Digg. I'm sure this will hurt Creative a bit, and it should. There's no excuse.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
Creative already has their money, and the chances are pretty good that they wouldn't buy creative anyway - they already have a card, and probably already have the fixed drivers, so they're set. And they will probably remember this, and see if another company works for their next purchase.
but it's not a lot of users. real effort should go to a campaign to inform potential buyers, which won't reach everyone, and those it does reach won't all understand the problem.
It's pretty clear this decision is not sitting well with Creative's customers. Why didn't they hire the guy? Seriously. You want to shut him up? Stop him from doing what he's doing? Hire him. Give him a buttload of money, put him under an NDA and a non-compete, then let him slowly sink into the morass that is your corporatized, politicized, developer quicksand. We'll never hear from him again.
Of course, I wish nothing of the sort for the guy. But it does seem like Creative took the very hard way out.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Ok, in Creative's little "approach sand, insert head" post, two things leap out at me:
:P. Le sigh.
:( oh well.
"By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods."
Um what? I've bought the bloody thing and it's mine / i've licensed its use. If i use my old CDs for drink coasters, how is that "stealing" something i've already paid you for? More to the point, if you sold me something originally stating its capabilities as A, B, and C, and now you tell me it's only A, haven't *you* stolen from *me*??
Although i fear the official legal reality supports their inane statement
"When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own."
Er well. That's different. Asking for donations for his work guaranteed a response from Creative. Tactical error there, mate. We'll never know what Creative would have done if he simply freely distributed them and never mentioned money, and Daniel_K has less options to respond.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
A hundred years ago, when I thought NT was the bees knees, I tried to use a Creative sound card. The problem was that I had a dual Pentium 200, and Creative just could be bothered to get their drivers to work with a dual-CPU motherboard. Note that I -know- this wasn't impossible at the time, because I got hold of an Ensoniq PCI, and it never bluescreened once. When Creative bought Ensoniq, I thought, great, now they'll get the software to do it right. WRONG! They destroyed Ensoniq's working drivers, and ruined the whole thing. As I built newer computers (always with a dual CPU), I kept using Ensoniq's because I knew they worked. Since I worked with a PC tech at work, I could always find a cast-off when I needed one.
The next Creative card I bought was the original Live, with the emu10k1 chip. I didn't realize how good I had it till I tried buying the Live 24-bit, which, of course (like wireless cards) had a -completely- different chipset. I could never make it work with Linux. What I didn't realize is that the emu10k1 has a hardware mixer on board. This obviated the need to get dmix working (which was the trick I gave up trying to learn). When mine died, I bought one from my PC-tech friend. Just the other week, I was working on an old computer for a friend, and I noticed he had one of these, and I told him that, if he ever wanted to get rid of the computer, I wanted the sound card.
I saw another post on here about how MAudio might be a suitable alternative these days. When those of you who use Linux are building computers these days, what sort of sound cards are you using, and how are you setting up the configuration so that everything (mplayer, Amarok, system sounds, etc.) are all going through a single mixer (e.g. the gnome panel applet)? Being a gamer, I want something that will work under Windows, but I want it to work -right- under Linux. I'm about to build a new computer, so this is an interesting time for this discussion to come up for me personally.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
I'm still using my SBLive! 5.1 card - mainly as a guitar FX processor (minus using it's 'distortion' and 'auto-wah' which just plain sucks.) Windows XP had the wonderful EAX control panel which would let me chain four effects together for making practically any sound I desired for my guitar.
Then came Vista - adios to that functionality. Creative now sucks royal balls.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I had owned a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold, their best card ever. Super clean recording and playback, solid drivers that "just worked". In 1998 I decided to get a SB Live! I was one of the lucky ones that owned a Intel 440BX chipset motherboard so I never had crackling problems with the card. I even bought a nice set of Cambridge Soundworks DTT2500 speakers and hooked it up to the DIN-9 port on the card for nice clean digital audio.
My first issue with the Live! appeared when Windows 2000 was released. Creative didn't have any drivers for the card, 2000 supported basic sound output out of the box though. So I landed up having to hack the NT4 drivers to work. Took about an hour and several tedious steps but it worked great. They finally released (buggy) drivers around the end of March of 2000, stable drivers finally came out in 2002 and thats what I'm using today with that card. On a side note, I also purchased a PC-DVD Dxr3 kit from Creative.... yeah no stable drivers for that ever too. Good thing the decoder card was a re-branded Sigma Designs Hollywood+ and their drivers worked with the Creative card.
Recently I built a machine with a X-Fi card. I notice the crappy quality of the onboard sound, plus I have a few MIDI devices that I like to use. First strike was that Creative dropped the DIN-9 speaker connection sometime around the release of the Audigy 2. So I now have to hook up the speakers via analog, no big deal as the DAC on the X-Fi is apparently better then the one in the DTT2500's decoder box. Next is the drivers, Creative dropped the Dolby Digital Live and DTS hardware encoding and decoding across the board. Not only do the Vista drivers lack the DDL/DTS functions, the latest XP drivers do too! Seems that Creative didn't want to renew their license at all for this technology, one has to hack it back in if they REALLY want it.
Anyway, I'm not surprised that Creative is doing badly financially. They started to ignore their biggest cash cow (long time soundcard customers) and are (were?) trying to fight the iPod. Guess what, the drivers and software for those suck too, thats why Apple is so successful... it "just works".
Screw creative, Torrent FTW!.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Hi folks,
Maybe you should load up ol' Phil's email inbox with complaints... or someone else at Creative, to let them know how shitty this is:
http://us.creative.com/corporate/pressroom/contact/
Or better yet...
Imagine enlightening all those people about the suckage of Windows and leading them towards a brighter, open source future of OSes like Linux or BSD?
Or even have them all switch to the BEST OS EVER - OSX.
What?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Sooooo... a thought occurred to me. What's a massive backlash against Creative going to do in the long run? It's not as if they are a cruel dictatorship bent on taking over the world--no, they are simply a hardware vendor.
I partially agree that perhaps their time has come and gone, after all there are more and more options out there for computer audio than there has been in quite a few years. Like it's been said, most mobo audio is "good enough" for your average computer user, and the argument that a discrete audio solution frees up cpu cycles quite frankly doesn't hold water anymore. There is no point for me to upgrade my ZS 2 until it either dies from old age or the PCI slot is entirely phased out (in which case I hope there's an adapter).
So be angry at Creative, but leave the pitchforks and torches at home. Boycotting them serves absolutely no purpose other then feeding our own primeval lust for revenge. They hurt you, so naturally you want to hurt them back but in reality it's not like they will all of a sudden go "We're sorry, here's a free audio card for everyone. Please buy more of our stuff." They will get the message, and if they change their ways, buy their stuff again. If not, then don't.
There is simply too much glass..
The new version 5.10.0.3540 of kX Audio Driver, which includes Vista support, has apparently been removed yesterday from the narod.ru server for "violation of rules". Any relation to this story?
Onboard 4 Life!
... I bought it many years ago, and I don't plan on upgrading it. If it fails, I'll just use onboard (despite mild crosstalk interference issues; I'm usually using analog wireless headphones anyway, so it hardly matters).
But seriously, I'm using an SB Live! Value 2.0 in my tower
I used to be interested in one of their MP3 devices, but now I'd probably rather just have an iPod Touch.
Their corporation is dying, and like all corporate death-dances, they are lashing out in what they think is self-defense. In reality, it's doing more harm than good.
I never used anything besides onboard audio and i can't complain about quality of sound.
And this is why you create a program which patch the driver. That way, nobody can accuse you of copyright infringement (you aren't distributing the driver or a derivative thereof, you are only making a program which add a few byte there and then for a specific driver version. I recall something similar for a network driver on W98), or stop distributing your program. After all if people want to take risk with this feature , that is their problem.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...is a great example of why proprietary software is inherently unethical, and we should all be exclusively using Free software instead. Proprietary software companies will screw you over, any chance they get.
Let them hear it where it matters...email them in person: poshaughnessy(at)creativelabs.com.
Speaking of the driver download issue, that was the point I stopped buying creative. I even emailed them and explained as much... and they insisted that wasn't the case. I pointed out that the drivers on their site simply are upgrades, and that you have to have the cd (which they will conveniently SELL to you), and the support people kept insisting I must be confused. That was when I knew they were a lost cause. I'm surprised it's taken everyone else this long to figure it out.
I just sent mr poshaughnessy at creativelabs.com a nice email
"Now what exactly did Creative have to gain by doing this? Maybe somewhere an unhappy customer who installed these drivers, and for whatever reason, they didn't work or broke something, and that ignorant but well meaning customer blames Creative."
Well, yes. But the big advantage is that by practicing their due diligence of keeping the links off of the forums, they're minimizing the chances of being sued by their licensors (Dolby, et al). Being sued is a huge financial risk, and it's dishonest to ignore this vital component of the situation.
It might be easy to shrug off a lawsuit as no big deal -- after all, it's happening to somebody else, right? But this is Slashdot, where we bemoan the $3K RIAA settlements and state that they "ruin lives." Being nailed for not doing their due diligence here would not make their day, either.
And if you think that Creative has the money -- well, they probably don't. Creative had to sell its headquarters just to avoid taking a huge loss last quarter.
"If they had half a brain, they would have quietly hired him for a very handsome sum of money. If they didn't try then they deserve whatever backlash they get."
Perhaps he'd be an asset to their engineering team, but remember that this isn't a story about Creative being unable to release the drivers -- they'd just rather not pay the licensing fees that will allow them to.
If this isn't clear to anybody reading this... say, for example, that some enterprising fellow fixed some bugs in OS X and then distributed his own "OS X Plus" -- not a diff, not a patch, but modified Apple code, which undoubtedly contains some technology licensed from other vendors. You can bet that Apple would remove all posts on their forum linking to the code, and make it a point to tell the fellow to stop distributing his hacked version of OS X and asking for donations for it. Would this piss off geeks? You bet. Would you and others be here pointing out that Apple's lawyers don't have "half a brain," to use your words? Probably. But Apple would still do it.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I would like to archive these drivers and ensure the public can obtain them, free of charge.
and I don't care what you say, that was a terrific card. I still have one somewhere -- one of the old 16-bit ISA ones.
+++ATH0
A sound card is a waste of money for most people these days unless you have special requirement.
I have been using MB digital outputs to Denon receiver for about 5 years now (since my first Nforce MB). I will never buy another sound card. Pointless waste of money.
I wonder if this is the way graphics cards are heading. There was a time when a sound card was absolutely necessary for gaming and really anything more than rudimentary squeaks and beeps. Now it's just not worth bothering with one; on-board is enough.
On-board graphics are pretty disappointing right now, but (particularly after AMD's acquisition of ATI) it might not be long before a video card is a waste of money for most people unless you have special requirement. That's already true of top-end cards, although they're still providing enough of a noticeable improvement that they're probably worth getting once the price drops.
GENERATION 25: If you haven't yet, copy this into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. (Social experiment)
Creative.Soundblaster.Audigy.Series.Vista.Drivers[by.daniel k]
It is extremely frustrating to be a PC gamer with this kind of crap. We gamers have to spend around $1000 or more for a decent gaming PC and we purchase quite capable hardware. Yet, we can't make full use of quad core machines with multiple graphics cards due to crappy drivers from Nvidia. We can't play our games in stereoscopic 3d because Nvidia won't spend a paltry few bucks to support it better. Nvidia makes the best graphics cards in terms of performance, yet their drivers AND their refusal to open source anything cripple them.
Creative makes the best gaming sound cards in terms of performance, but their shitty software and the inability to download decent drivers when you lose the install cd cripple them as well. Creative's idiocy can be the weak link in a $10,000 sound system that you want to use for PC games.
And then, Microsoft. DirectX 10 is pretty spiffy...but they chain it to an OS that is NOT suitable for high performance real time games.
All three of these people could serve gamers MUCH better than they do, without spending any more money.
I own 2 Soundblaster live 5.1 cards with the media deck. I had a hell of a time getting them to work on Windows XP as it is, and the media deck doesn't work in Linux (pick a distro). The big reason I liked the card is because of the media deck that gives me a full size headphone and microphone plug with volume control knobs and midi in/out ports and digital and SPDIF ports too all on a dock that sits in a 5 1/4 in slot in the front of my tower. I've been getting peaved at creative lately myself. But Does anyone know of a decent non-creative sound card like the Soundblaster 5.1 live card?
Thanks,
The Truth is a Virus!!!
The irony generator in this Verse is fun, eh? I was looking for the Via disk corruption fix forever until I finally gave up and upgraded. Couldn't seem to hunt down the problem the entire time I used that AthlonXP Aopen board. Now I find that it was a simple change in the BIOS? Damn!
Well thanks Creative! Because of you I finally went to the M-Audio Delta 1010lt piped through a 1972 Marantz 1060 amp into some Sennheiser HD280 Pros.
Creative, without your craptasticness I would never have known what things ACTUALLY sound like outside the arena of Ipod buds and cheap Sony monitor headphones!!!
I've been a long time Creative user, and they've lost me with this one. I have used Soundblaster cards since the 8-bit Soundblaster Pro. Since then I've owned the Soundblaster 16, AWE 32, and a couple cards in the Audigy series. For over 15 years, I've used Creative's cards almost exclusively (aside from a brief stint with the Pro Audio Spectrum 16).
When Vista SP1 was released last week, I didn't see it in Windows Update because the latest driver available for my Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro was not compatible with the update (see this KB article). This driver hasn't been updated since March 2007, and didn't work all that well to boot. Analog 5.1 surround was sketchy, and the sub channel didn't even work.
Daniel_K came to the rescue in my situation. I needed to uninstall my drivers to upgrade to SP1, then install his driver package get my card working again. The installation went very smoothly, and my card is working better than it ever has on Vista. There are some quirks, but all surround channels are working as they should, and sound quality seems to be improved over the previous drivers (although this could easily be attributed to the placebo effect).
The last thing that Creative should be doing is going after Daniel_K. If anything, they should hire the guy to teach their driver team a thing or two.
Sadly, this is not likely a technical issue, but a marketing one. Creative seems to have made a deliberate decision to leave Audigy users in the cold in an effort to get them to upgrade to their new X-Fi series. Problem is, it doesn't seem to be working. Peruse Creative's support forums and you'll see post after post lamenting their substandard driver support with promises to avoid their cards in the future.
Creative's strategy may work with casual customers with a sub-$50 card, but not for others who have invested over $200 for a high-end Audigy card with a breakout box. Those people are still looking for return on their investment, and will be the first to walk away from Creative when they get snubbed.
Hopefully this is a misunderstanding, and Creative will work out a deal with Daniel_K. If this doesn't happen, they stand to lose some of their most loyal customers. Given their track record so far, the outlook doesn't look good.
Someone mod this guy up, not because it's a fantastic post or anything, but I don't see it as deserving the troll mod it has received.
With all these comments about how things don't work in Vista, I ask myself how this can be noticed on Slashdot. I mean, come on, this is Slashdot and all Slashdot readers use Linux and hate anything made by Microsoft. There's no way any Slashdot reader can possibly ever be exposed to some program made by Microsoft, let alone Vista -- the evil of of all evils.
You can get perfect positional audio with headphones that have a head position tracker. Not otherwise.
See, your brain is always comparing the left and right volume of discrete sounds and knows that when you turn your head left, sounds behind you should get louder. If they do not, then your sound position sense is confused.
Most people will unconciously turn their head when trying to pin down a sound location.
You mean creative labs???!@??
Are they still around? I thought they went under years ago.
I mean who actually uses their products with crappy drivers and slow update proccess anyway?
The onboard soundcards these days are a much better more often updated and have easier to use more compatible drivers anyway.
Time to let creative die like they should have years ago.
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
I use a Turtle Beach Montego DDL and I love it.
I ditched Creative way back when once I discovered they transcode ALL output to 48Khz. Since I went to Turtle Beach, I must say -- my life is MUCH easier with respect to "good" sound cards. (ie: not onboard)
It also has the nice ability to output anything in DD 5.1 -- even if it's stereo only. My audio receiver really likes that because I don't go in and out of Dolby Digital. Just a nice, clean, constant 5.1 stream all the time. And yes, it supports Vista.
That is not why they go to the pink sheets.
Each exchange (NYSE, Nasdaq, etc) has their own requirements for listing. If you can't meet the requirements (there are many), then you trade on the pink sheets.
It has nothing to do with CPA's signing off or not signing off.
Why do I keep multple drivers around?
I bought a soundblaster live! value card and added an S/PDFIF in/out adaptor from Hoontech. I went through hell trying to find drivers that actually showed the digital input and allow me to control what the card did.
I use that card in a multimedia PC, it connects to my DVB-S digital satellite receiver to record BBC radio programs in very high quality, far better than DVB-T or DAB!
They talked about this occasionally every couple years. But I haven't heard mention of it for quite a while now. I'm pretty sure they decided to get out of the soundcard market. Which is a pity, AFAIK they pioneered the dolby digital live feature and creative hasn't bothered to put it into any of their hardware for 6 years now.
All creative have done is made more people aware a better driver exists, just looking on Google over the last 24 hours loads of website have been created with mirrors to these drivers.
I just downloaded them in-case I ever need them from here: http://digiex.net/drivers/164-creative-audigy-series-vista-32bit-x86-vista-64bit-x64-drivers-daniel_k.html
I checked with management, and it was decided we would bring back the Audigy Support Pack thread and allow you to continue in that endeavor. As long as no intellectual property of Creative is distributed, we will have no problem with it. I will get the thread reposted shortly.
Dale
They're letting him continue support now, though the original thread made by the moderator Dale remains for some reason.
It is important. If Daniel_K lives in the USA, his reverse-engineering and modification of the drivers is protected and allowed. It is not a violation of their copyrights (and no, Creative, he's not stealing, just ask your crack legal team). While he probably doesn't have the right to distribute their drivers, he would be within his right to distribute a patch for them (binary deltas, plus a utility to apply them to a driver). And, yes, he can ask for donations for it -- he can even charge money for it. If Daniel_K hired a good copyright attorney, he'd know that (I'm sure Creative probably does).
Half-Life Counterstrike supported A3D2, which included wave-tracing. This did a fairly simple modelling of early
reflections, which allows your ears/brain to figure out the approximate size and shape of the space you are in.
In simple terms, this meant you could fire a pistol and the wave-tracing added reflected sounds that made it apparent
that you were standing in a courtyard, or a hallway, etc. If you walked into an arched doorway and fired, you could
actually hear the reflections change as you moved in and out of the doorway. It gave context to the sound and made
everything sound more realistic instead of just as dry sound samples.
Creative on the other hand, didn't support A3D2 and only had it's canned EAX reverb presets. All this did was apply a
type of reverb as decided by the map info. You would cross a magic line and suddenly it would play "chasm preset". As
you walked over this line the reverb simply turned off or changed to whatever the adjacent space was "set" to.
Surprise, surprise, it sounded fake and really added nothing to the sound.
So when Aureal finally went under, CL bought up all of Aureal's technology.
Fast-forward to today. We have quad core cpus instead of P2 300's and we still have no real audio features like
wave-tracing/early reflections.
Creative Labs bought Aureal's technology and then proceeded to never use it or do anything similar.
The last survey by Steam showed that something like 75% of gamers use the free onboard Soundmax/Realtek chipsets
instead of a separate PCI card. The average gamer, who is the captive audience for such addon cards, sees no value
in what CL offers. CL doesn't put any features in it's card that actually make gamers want to buy them.
Creative made it's bed, now it gets to sleep in it.
Creative has jumped the shark as far as sound cards go (somewhere around the SBLive era). It's understandable enough - all a Windows PC needs is a decent DAC, DMA, and a chip with enough power to mix a few dozen sounds. SBLive did this perfectly and what were the marketing people supposed to do when onboard sound chips caught up? Make up crap like the XFi, that's what.
The XFi is a total waste of time, more marketing than anything else. I don't want my music "crystallized", I want it as the artist intended, but nowhere in the huge chunk of crapware provided by Creative is a button to turn off all the processing. When you can't actually play sound *without* distorting it then you've got problems.
Creative speakers are also crap. I can buy a complete stereo system for $50 (speakers, DVD player, radio, etc.) which sounds better than their flagship desktop speakers at twice the price. I actually fell for the hype on those and bought some. They sound awful - boomy, boxy sound and a big hole in the mid range where the vocals are supposed to be. Creative's return policy is a nightmare so I sold them on eBay. I hope the buyer a) only ever listens to Gangsta Rap, or b) is as cloth-eared as the people who gave the T20 all those awards.
(Aside, WTF is going on with the whole "PC speaker" thing? Why must PC speakers be so crap...?)
So my XFi is in a drawer and I've got the digital output of my SBLive connected to an external system and I've vowed to never buy another Creative product.
If my next motherboard has built-in digital output I'll probably ditch the SBLive as well.
No sig today...
b4 moi start read out words 4 words than u kan komprehend moi massage.... kreative hor damned nusiance moi a sapporter of dam in hardwares butt dair drivers ley sucked 2 zee kore.. if u all t/s systems liat moi u all vormit till dat john iz full of moi meals... usin dell kannock used packard bell s/kard driver same hardware.. worst iz dat bloomin sb live 5.1 series.. moi bough zee org 1st launched sb live 5.1 gold with dat americano plastik 5.1 speeker ahnddelivered personallee by nun ada dan sim wong hoo zee head man serious kosher stuff noe bull sh i t.. within 3 mths moi gif dat speeker awae 2 klient.... aiyah yah... todae? moi noe buy aneemore s/kard all used mobo inbuilt....
However bitter and dryly saracastic parent may sound, it sure rings a bell. I personaly would have added that "new" corporations still have customers in a way : they bend to their shareholders much like oldstyle corps. used to with their customer base. It certainly goes along with capital dilution into the general public. While oldstyle corps had fewer shareholders, management had to treat customers well to generate profit. With capital dilution, managers are more or less selling corporate image to the market, they have much less risk to be fired over real performance. But they are judged on perceived value. Due to the late hour, I hope this garbage makes sense at all ;-)
I mean really... surely one of you knows where to get these modded drivers? Why has this info not been posted in an effort to stick it to the man?
Like anything else, there's now an online petition about this:
http://www.petitiononline.com/crtvlabs/petition.html
It demands decent drivers in the first place, decent driver support, properly labeled products, and support for OSS development.
Up to nearly 800 messages hammering them for being ar$ehole$
I think they uncivered some sentiments that they wish they hadnt...
Serves them right, arrogant bastards
just google daniel_k creative driver, and the first thing that comes up is a TPB torrent for the drivers in question :) ill be merrily seeding for the next 48 hours or more! :)
im using creative sound cards since 1999. never used another. i never been into modding either.
however rest assured this idiot stunt your lawyerhead jerks pulled will affect my next sound card purchase choice.
you should listen to your users instead of your lawyerheads. dont piss on the hand that feeds you.
Read radical news here
As near I can tell from other comments and bits and pieces I picked up, the "business decision" was to disable Dolby code on certain cards so that they would not have to pay Dolby royalties, so that the end users could get a cheaper sound card without having to have two production lines. Which suggests that when Daniel_K enabled the Dolby code, Dolby came knocking and demanded royalties from Creative.
I can understand where Creative is coming from, but they really should have used a carrot-and-stick approach: tell him to stop giving away the driver and asking for donations, and in return offering to buy the driver code from him and remove the Dolby stuff. Everybody would win: Creative's reputation would stay intact, Daniel_K would get reasonable compensation for his work, and consumers would get what they paid for (no more: sorry, no Dolby if they didn't pay for it. But also no less: a working sound card with solid drivers)
I am quite glad I came across this. I had Creative on a purchasing blacklist for 5+ years now, and was just thinking about giving them another chance...
How did they get onto this list? By pulling the EXACT SAME STUNT you guys are talking about for Vista and Audigy and I experienced with XP and Live. The strategy to "support" the customer was pretty much:
"Send us $20 to get a CD with new drivers on it, which... by the way, won't work either"
Leaving the user to try and find hacked up drivers on the web that actually worked worth a damn.
So... I see now that some things will never change. And I extend my blacklisting of Creative's products another 5 or more years.
I refuse to purchase anything from a vendor which, as a matter of policy, holds the paying customer hostage for more money just to use the item for it's most basic purposes.
Have you painted a shed today?
I don't know if this has been put out there or not but:
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4106373/Creative.Soundblaster.Audigy.Series.Vista.Drivers%5Bby.daniel_k%5D
I clicked on the link and got a message that the post was deleted.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
Phil O'Shaughnessy
Vice President, Corporate Communications
poshaughnessy@creativelabs.com
I've been quite pleased with M-Audio cards, though linux support in alsa can be a bit dodgy (check before buying).
In accordance to Vita specs the Creative driver is behaving as expected under the DRM polices. Here is a link about http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html vista_cost
Love Linux and 3D (OpenGL) Linux games.
The drivers seems to be available on Pirate Bay.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4106373/Creative.Soundblaster.Audigy.Series.Vista.Drivers%5Bby.daniel_k%5D
I think the parent was referring to Creative's official closed source drivers for Linux 64.
Among all problems is that those are distributed in binary only from, and thus only work on AMD64-compatible 64bits Linux kernels.
There's no way you could run them on a 32bit kernel.
The OSS drivers have only started to support X-Fi very recently and are still beta. And ALSA drivers haven't even been started yet. So for now there aren't that much option to compile your own drivers for whatever processor you own... yet.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Creative already got bad rep back when id software was finishing doom 3.
Link: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/32824
http://www.creative.com/corporate/pressroom/releases/welcome.asp?pid=12910
CREATIVE SIGNS MOU FOR THE PROPOSED SALE AND LEASEBACK OF ITS HEADQUARTERS BUILDING - CREATIVE RESOURCE FOR $250 MILLION
SINGAPORE - March 24, 2008 - Creative Technology Ltd., a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products, today announced that the Company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a buyer for the proposed sale and leaseback of the Creative Resource building, which houses the corporate headquarters of the Company and its subsidiaries in Singapore.
The sale price for this proposed transaction is S$250 million (US$180 million), with a leaseback of the whole building for a period of five years with an option for additional periods of three and two years.
The proposed sale and leaseback transaction is conditional upon and subject to certain conditions, including but not limited to, satisfactory completion of legal and building due diligence by the purchaser, the Company's shareholders' approval of the transaction, and applicable regulatory approvals.
The proposed sale of the property constitutes a major transaction under Rule 1006 of the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited Listing Manual and accordingly is subject to shareholders' approval at an Extraordinary General Meeting of the Company (EGM) to be convened at a later date. A circular to the Company's shareholders, together with notice of the EGM, will be dispatched to shareholders in due course. The circular will contain more details of the proposed transaction.
The proposed transaction is expected to be completed by the end of June 2008.
Creative expects to make a gain on sale of the property of about S$200 million (US$144 million) from this transaction. In accordance with US GAAP, this amount will be treated as a deferred gain and will be amortised and recognised in the Company's Income Statements over the lease term of five years...
hahahha
i figured this was coming years ago, went to M-audio instead. rock solid drivers, no bullshit. i will NEVER buy another creative product. and if any of you are still thinkin about it, consider where the company is going. they were good, they got richer, and then they started to suck. now they are about to fold.. if you are still thinking your going to get good drivers/support/products from creative, you have something wrong with your bullshit detector.
and the have been heading there for a while now. Every "upgrade" I've ever bought has turned out to be a disappointment. Their drivers and firmware are crap, they have actually removed certain features from their Zen Vision:M series in the form of firmware "upgrades" (removing the ability to record from live radio is the first example that comes to mind) and the 2 players I've bought from them (a Zen Touch 20GB and Zen Vision:M 60GB) have both died within a year.
Lost the CD that comes with your Creative Player and want to reinstall Creative Media Explorer so you can start copying music to your player? Tough, you wont find it anywhere on their website, they don't offer it for download. (I even have the sneaking suspicion that while hunting for it I found them offering to ship it on CD for £8, although don't quote me on this being true or the price being anywhere near accurate).
I personally never plan on buying from them again, at least not until they pull their act together and start pushing updates that actually add features and drivers that work (Linux support would be lovely too, gnomad2 gets the job done but it's no where near perfect). I've always tried to avoid the iPod, but it's looking increasingly likely that my next mp3 player will be one.
Their hardware, according to Creative, doesn't work fully with Vista.
Oh whoops. They were lying.
Asking for donations is bad now? Creative makes sound cards. Apparently, they don't make drivers any more. So why would they care? We should pray to jesus that they go out of business.
Yea. You can thank Creative for wasting your time and money. I wonder what it will take to make this company irrelevant?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Or more likely Sarbanes-Oxley.
Are we sure Creative could add features (such as Vista compatibility) to this card they already shipped, without asking for payment, and not been in trouble over SOX? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act.
-- Terry
"You can't allow somebody to provide drivers for your hardware on your site like that. For all anyone knows this guy could get bored and make the driver into a hilarious trojan horse virus."
First of all, I'd say you're a marketer's dream. You think companies like this care about anything other than next quarter's profit. You think that this has to do with ethics and "doing the right thing".
Sonny boy, look at what you're seeing here. It appears Creative could supply drivers that would add functionality to older cards. Good right? No BAD. VERY BAD. First of all, only knuckleheads buy sound cards nowadays, but even if we get past the "knucklehead" thing, they don't make money providing new drivers for older cards. So they make excuses about the hardware not being compatible and other bullshit to fool enough people like you into thinking this is harder than it appears.
The kid did absolutely the right thing. There was no harm in giving him $5 for his time, and there was no harm to creative, right? WRONG! VERY VERY BAD! People with a working sound card aren't likely to buy a new one. So they "broke" it under the guise of driver incompatibility, so now you have to buy that new card.
Seriously, you're head is really all screwed up on this one. You're off in the weeds.
... but for a different cause than why he is punished.. Instead of developing for Vista, he could have as well developed for Linux kernel in the meanwhile. ;-)
It's hard to focus on the article with the huge add for a "Quality Russian Dating Service" below. It's bad enough that Slashdot is running ads, but this is downright pathetic. It's a nice example of targeted advertising though...
I only bought their soundcards, usually the top of their line.
Now I own a Platinum XFi that wont let me use the mic port on the Platinum drive bay (making the bay utterly worthless, thanks a lot creative, I'd like my money back), forcing me to use the shared jack ($200 and it shares jacks!?!) on the card which is not only inconvenient but means I can not use the digital output, forcing me to use analog which gives me an annoying 60Hz hum and booms when I turn the ceiling fan on or off.
And I can't upgrade to Vista, either.
But Creative, as all other companies, is a "planified obsolescence" company. It destroys its old products in order to sell new products, so if Daniel K ruined its plans, he has to be sued (at less).
The problem is that now everybody knows the case, and it became a scandal, and many people is very angry.
Slightly off-topic here, but since Intel HDA was brought up. . . I've been wondering about this, maybe someone could explain this to me. I have a Dell Inspiron laptop.
Under Windows, the sound card is detected as a SigmaTel HDA sound card, but under Linux, it shows up as Intel HDA. Does the laptop have 2 sound cards, and each O/S is detecting a different chip? Or is it just the same chip, but the drivers are named differently in the different O/S (that is, is "Intel HDA" really just SigmaTel?)
I've been a user of Creative Lab's soundcards since the late 90's with an SB16 in my old 386. They've always had quirks with the drivers they provide, but this isn't the first time they did something like this.
My old Windows 98 box had an AWE64 Gold ISA interface card in it that absolutely rocked at the time- Linux compatibility, Win32 compatibility and DOS compatibility were never an issue with it. I ended up replacing that AWE64 Gold card with a PCI Live! card, which enabled DOS-level compatibility with a checkbox in the driver for SB16 compatibility mode. DOS compatibility was something I was really concerned with as I used to rely on Fasttracker II for things, which wasn't Win32 compatible. This is where things get interesting...
I ended up doing an XP Pro upgrade to the 98SE installation I had on that PC. Everything actually went well with it (to my surprise) and XP found it correctly, the correct drivers and everything were there and it was a solid and reliable card. DOSBox wasn't stable at the time for it, so I used to have a 98SE boot CD to get back into pure DOS mode so I could use Fasttracker II, which needed that SB16 compatibility mode, and again, it worked just fine.
Fast forward a year or two. I built a second PC with another SB Live and wanted it to do the same thing, but I started clean with XP Pro and the Creative drivers for it. Needless to say, it didn't work in pure DOS mode at all and didn't even include the executables that provided the SB16 emulation - apparently that something Creative enabled in the Win9x drivers for the Live, not the NT/2000/XP drivers. After a ton of searching on the original 98-to-XP box, I ended up pulling the files I needed over to the XP box and got it doing the same thing. The card was always capable of it, they just decided that XP users will never need or want DOS compatibility.
Given that, is it really surprising that they'd remove functionality from XP to Vista? Nope, because for me they did the same from 98 to NT/2000/XP. Even still, for some reason I bought an Audigy Platinum and also an X-Fi Platinum because they meet my needs - I do enough audio recording to use the patchbay/live drive thing, but not enough to need a studio-class card.