Creative Backs Down on Vista Driver Debacle

In the wake of last week's driver debacle, Creative has finally decided to back down for PR purposes. Modder Daniel_K, author of the offending Vista drivers, has had his posts on the Creative forums reinstated. According to Creative the move was to avoid infringing on other company's IP. "Daniel_K is incensed by Creative. 'They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance,' he told El Reg by email. He told us that Creative contacted him on a chat session. 'They were sarcastic, ironic and asked me if I wanted something from them, as if I were expecting something,' he wrote. 'It was my protest against them and would like to see how far it would go.'"

Comments

first post!

[Anonymous Coward]

modded illegally by the community!

Good for him

[Megaweapon]

The way Creative publically handled the situation was so stupid they deserve the continued bad publicity.

Re:Good for him

[Shados]

Seriously. It is so close to the corportate equivalent of "dumb suicide" that it should deserve a Darwin Award

Re:Good for him

[dgatwood]

I kind of wish they would die, if only so we wouldn't have to let down so many disappointed people who bought Creative's X-Fi and Audigy hardware thinking it would be a good card for home recording only to find out that it utterly sucks at it. Between the high latency and all the post-processing it does to make the sound "better" (much of which is apparently hard to turn off), it's about the worst possible choice for that use, yet Creative seems to market it as though it would be good for that. Not to mention that the sound quality on the inputs just isn't up to snuff compared to even the cheapest M-Audio hardware.

At a minimum, the company deserves the corporate equivalent of life in prison without parole for the number of people the company has harmed with their product claims.

Re:Good for him

[neumayr]

Tech companies exagerate their product's capabilities for marketing reasons, more news at 11 or something.

Re:Good for him

[DaleGlass]

Some of those geeks work at places like universities and large companies and make purchase decisions. Others give advice to less knowledgeable people.

An important thing to note here is that a dedicated soundcard is no longer a necessary component of a computer due to onboard sound. A large part of Creative's market are going people who decide on their own to buy a soundcard for some reason, and which card they choose will depend quite heavily on some geek's opinion.

Re:Good for him

[bhima]

If you'll look I think you'll find that the downloads for his work number in the many 10's of thousands.

So I doubt it's just a few angry kids.

Re:Good for him

[plague3106]

Your assertion that dedicated sound cards aren't needed anymore is plain silly. Unless the only sounds your computer will play are the Windows ones, you're going to want a dedicated card because of all the noise the onboard cards introduce.. especially if you're recording any audio, which is part of editing videos on your computer.. which a growing number of people are doing.

Re:Good for him

[Bombula]

It would definitely be nice if Creative died - or at least got some decent competition. It's a good example of a market totally dominated by one company that churns out crappy stuff. I know a fair bit about their EAX technology from personal experience, as I tried to patent a 3D positional audio technology in the mid 90s. Aureal beat me to it, but they folded. I think their IP ended up with another company called Sensaura. They're gone now too, and their site directs to ... Creative.

Still no true 3D positional audio through EAX either, just some hackneyed binaural cues. It's a shame, but I guess that's just how the stone rolls.

Re:Good for him

[Shados]

The assertion from the previous poster basically meant "You can have a working, full featured computer without having to care about buying a sound card, a bit like you can do the same with network cards".

Last time this subject came up, I said that onboard sound was more than good enough: multiple people proved me wrong, and indeed, i was, so I'm not going to try and argue that. However, point is, for 90% of people, the computer will be functional as is. Games will run fine, their MP3s will play fine (and I can't hear any noise introduced by the board during playback, and its quite limited and hard to notice during recording... of course, not viable for professional work), everything will be "good enough" to the average joe (as opposed to videocards, where even Joe will realise really quickly that his onboard video isn't good enough when he can't even run a 3 years old game on his machine).

So that means that ALMOST EVERYONE who buys a sound card, knows what they want. Low noise, professional features, instrument ports, specific encoder/decoders support, and they'll want quality (and the tone of your post is quite in line with this statement).

So Creative cannot sell shitty feature-less cards easily. They have to have a LOT over an onboard card for someone to want it.

Re:Good for him

[DigitAl56K]

They didn't have any real competition, until recently. Now the ASUS XONAR, and the slightly lower spec'd Razer Barracuda are direct competitors for the X-Fi, minus the later revisions of EAX. However, I could not be happier if EAX died on it's ass, because it's one of the few things locking consumers into Creative boards these days, and the sooner we can wave goodbye to Creative's monopoly the better.

Re:Good for him

[mcmonkey]

Throw in Hi def gaming, or a real media center, and a soundcard isn't just an enthusiasts upgrade, it's a necessity.

IOW, it is just an enthusiasts upgrade.

Re:Good for him

[Fozzyuw]

Thanks,

Since reading this incredible arrogance from Creative...

Phil O'Shaughnessy, ultimately asked him to stop [modding their drivers], and accused him of "stealing their goods." O'Shaughnessy also wrote that whether or not it cripples its Vista drivers is a "business decision that only we have the right to make."

I don't want to buy another sound card from them again. I was just wondering what might be some good competitors to which it seems you've answered.

Re:Good for him

[Bassman59]

The only thing they had going for them once upon a time was Ensoniq's IP, which they proceeded to flush down the crapper.

The thing is, at the time of Ensoniq's implosion, they were eating Creative for breakfast in the soundcard biz. Ensoniq was first with PCI soundcards which were "Soundblaster compatible" (meaning they worked with old DOS games that talked directly to the SB16's ISA-bus register space; that's completely irrelevant now but a big deal back then) and Creative couldn't get their own stuff to work. And Gateway was buying Ensoniq's cards by the boatload, and other PC vendors were looking at doing the same.

It really is too bad that Ensoniq had issues that lead to Creative buying them. Basically, Creative didn't care about the musical instrument side of Ensoniq; Creative just bought Ensoniq to shut down their better competitor.

Re:Good for him

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Haha, after re-reading that, it appears you are correct. In a slashdot 1st... I conceede I stand corrected!

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

100$ motherboards (e.g. gigabyte P35-DS3L) nowadays have perfectly fine Intel HDA/Realtek high def audio onboard. My gigabyte P35-DS3R (Realtek ALC 889A codec) has 7.1 + 2 channel audio (7.1 and stereo, playing independently, at the same time), supports all the latest HD audio codecs used by Blu-Ray, does 192 kHz / 24 bit audio, has a spdif (coax) and toslink (optical) outputs, as well as GREAT (and very loud) headphone output via the onboard jumper block. Same SNR as a Audigy 2 (106 db). Works fine with windows and linux too (great drivers too, unlike creative). No forced internal resampling like SB live, no phony processing (e.g. the x-fi's crystallizer), it can do bit-perfect playback too, etc. Great set of inputs/outputs too (6 analog, toslink, spdif, plus the ones in front of my case) -- much better than the basic creative cards (e.g. the X-Fi's spdif out is also the mic in!) The only thing I can think of that could be nice to have over that, is dolby digital live, and some even have it (e.g. ALC888 DD).

The amount of ppl doing recording on their home PC is likely below 1%. Those might need multichannel low-latency ASIO, but for the rest of us, onboard auio is more than good enough. It's not like the crappy AC97 of 10 years ago anymore.

Re:Good for him

[d3ac0n]

Well, there's always these guys: http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/mtgoddl/home.aspx

They've been making fantastic audiophile-grade cards for Win machines for years.

Word of warning though, their older stuff (Santa Cruz in particular) does NOT play nice with Linux, despite being generally fantastic on Windows machines.

Best audio setup I ever had was back when on my old AMD XP1900+ box running Windows XP with my Santa Cruz card hooked to my Monsoon 5.1 flat panel surround sound speakers. Not uber powerful, but INCREDIBLE sound imagery if you were in the "sweet spot". I remember sitting and listening to CDs on my PC because the sound was just so damn much better than even on my stereo.

Unfortunately, that entire setup is long gone. The motherboard burst it's caps, which sent a surge to the audio card, killing it and down to the Monsoon subwoofer (which held all the critical electronics) killing it too. I held onto the Monsoon speakers, but the company went under shortly afterward, and I haven't been able to get replacement parts for it.

Now I just make do with crappy 2.1 onboard audio and elcheapo logitec speakers. The sound is passable for low level listening to background music, but little else. Ahh for the days of yore...

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to heartily disagree with the last statement you made, that there has to be a huge benefit to buy a dedicated soundcard.

most of Creative's customers are what I like to call the "dumb gamer"(not to say all gamers are dumb). They go to fry's or walmart looking for something to make their computer better for games and a salesperson will sell them a Creative product (snazzy box, designed and built for clueless installers).

add to that a generation of people that were raised on "if it isn't creative it just won't work" back from the days when Creative were the only ones making decent drivers for their products, and you have a good customer base that keeps Creative afloat no matter what color of crap they sell to people.

I do agree with your point that onboard sound is good enough for most people, and a sound pro is probably going to know what he needs and skip Creative's products. you hit the nail on the head on both of those accounts.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

on-board sound is "good enough" for most users. most people think mp3 is a high-quality format, and those people will never be able to hear a difference in sound quality anyway. if you have a few tb's of .flac flies, on-board sound isn't for you. but then again if you were the type to prefer flac over mp3, you'd already know that. i guess my point is that anyone who asks "is on-board sound good enough?" is probably going to be just happy with it. many of the on-board options exceed the quality of dedicated mp3 players, so if you listen to an ipod constantly, you'd probably think the on-board sound on many mobos is fabulous.

Re:Good for him

[Mex]

Ha ha, wow, are they really marketing it as a home recording solution?

Because I have one (X-Fi, got it included in my PC) and while it's an acceptable sound card(How hard is that, really), it would be absolutely useless for recording.

I used Guitar Rig just for giggles on it, and the latency is so bad (even with the rather good Asio4all drivers) that it's useless for serious use.

I think it would be criminal if they advertised it as something serious for recording.

Re:Good for him

[Z34107]

I've been looking at the whole Creative situation for a little while now - I used to be a big fan of their hardware. My first SB16 kicked so much ass during the Glory Days of Microprose and Windows 3.11...

So, naturally, I was disenheartened to hear how poorly this was handled. But, angry lawyer-speak aside, my understanding is that Creative had a few (legitimate) problems:

• ALchemy. My understanding is that Microsoft removed DirectSound, or some part of DirectSound, from Vista because their new driver model or DirectX model or something ruined things. Create rewrote a DirectSound emulator for their new X-Fi cards, and later ported it to their older ones. Presumably because of how many man-hours go into designing something like this, they wanted to charge money for older cards to use it. This guy took the free X-Fi version and removed hardware checks so it would run on any card. This is the "stealing their goods" complaint.
• Crippling Vista drivers is a "business decision that only we have the right to make"? That's true, but they're not being selfish assholes. (Well, only a little.) They licensed a bunch of technologies from other companies, but licensed it only for XP. D'oh. Now, here's a guy, on their own forums nonetheless, enabling these technologies on Vista. Can you say "lawsuit?"

I built my current rig over the summer, and I have yet to put a proper sound card in it. The onboard audio is fairly good - my Striker Extreme motherboard comes with a riser card, which seems to have taken care of most of the motherboard noise. (Or, maybe it's just to trick people into thinking they're getting a real sound card.) I have a dual core processor, so a little audio work isn't going to hurt it much. (And then there are games like Doom 3 that process all sound, in software, in a separate thread, and completely ignore hardware acceleration.) I'm not going to get a sound card and use up a precious expansion slot until I get better speakers - and living in a dorm, that won't be for quite some time.

It's a shame they're having problems like this, though. They had good, solid products, and I've been quite happy with them and their drivers up through the Audigy. (I haven't purchased one since.)

Maybe AMD will surprise the world by including kick-ass audio equipment in its spider-monkey platform or whatever...

Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[scubamage]

Given that NVidia is getting nailed with a class action lawsuit because of handicapped drivers, I have to wonder if Creative's withdrawal is less a product of PR and more of fear that they could be put in a similar court situation. I mean, punishing someone because they release un-crippled versions of your drivers kind of spotlights your company for having crippled drivers in the first place - the basis of the nvidia case.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[zappepcs]

does it really matter whether they were trying to save face, or trying to save their asses in court?

Either way, the Internet has yet again handily shown another large corporate entity that 'do no evil' is a pretty damned good motto.

That once letter to the local paper editor gets millions of reads these days. Despite their efforts, many businesses and their practices are transparent to the public whether they like it or not. The "blowback" from that is what some like to call 'market forces' at work :)

Google was rather bright to call everything beta, and only put a line through the word when everyone was happy with how it works. When you produce products and make claims of a general nature and have no clear plan with how to deal with those inevitable questions from reviewers and users... well, blowback is the natural response.

Trying to hush up the competition is ... er... illegal. Trying to hush those that would expose you to the competition is essentially the same thing, and quite the example of not 'don't be evil'.

It's just a shame that the folks at Creative had to fsck it up like this when they could have created a PR positive experience of it.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[Kandenshi]

I'm pretty sure that the lesson is "don't do evil in ways where you stand a good chance of getting caught. Do lots and lots of evil (if it's profitable) in areas where you're not likely to get bad publicity/legal action out of it.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[Enderandrew]

You never know when you might get caught, so the actual lesson is "don't be evil".

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[timster]

You're forgetting that some Slashdotters have been taught that there's some law requiring corporations to be evil as long as there is profit in it. After all, if it's in a documentary it must be true.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[garett_spencley]

I prefer a "always do evil" philosophy. Sure some people may get mad at you and you may get bad PR etc. but "do no evil" is boring. "Do evil" is a great way to ensure that things stay interesting.

Think about it...

Where would Slashdot be if Microsoft was not an evil monopolistic corporation ?

Where would Slashdot be if the RIAA were not suing grandmothers and college students ?

Where would Slashdot be if Jack Thompson was not suing video game manufacturers ?

Where would Slashdot be if Creative released Vista drivers that work ?

You see, by being evil you effectively bring life to the Internet. Without evilness no one would have anything to bitch about and everyone would be too busy watching porn and looking up peach cobbler recipes. FUCK THAT!

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[geekboy642]

It's not a law. It's the fact that corporations are beholden, essentially, to only their shareholders. The shareholders, by and large, want only one thing: more profit. Corporations thus function like an entity at Pre-Conventional Stage 2 morality, or the "what's in it for me?" stage (refc. Kohlberg). This does not mean they have an emphasis on doing evil, this means they don't care whether what they do is evil or not.

They only care about not getting caught when they do evil. Creative was caught, and now they are back-peddling to try to avoid the consequences of their actions.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that NVidia is getting nailed with a class action lawsuit because of handicapped drivers, I have to wonder if Creative's withdrawal is less a product of PR and more of fear that they could be put in a similar court situation. I don't know what the nvidia lawsuit is about, maybe not enough parking spaces or ramps? You'd think though in this day and age people would take this stuff more seriously.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[TheLink]

"But a corporation isn't a person. It's neutral"

In theory yes.
In practice, it's not neutral. It's as evil as the people that control it. It is an extension of those people's will.

Making a fine distinction between a machine and the invisible people controlling it as the machine goes about crushing people, is correct in theory.

But in practice, if the same people keep controlling it, you might as well associate their brand with "Evil". After all those invisible people in control are often so interested in Brand consciousness.

And Brand consciousness is currently the main reason why anyone would buy Creative sound cards.

This doesn't happen with free software

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Creative is acting adversarial, but what you must understand is that

Daniel_k had no right to modify Creative's software. They did not grant

him the right and he was not using an OS that granted him any rights.

People need to start purchasing products which give them the freedom to

use the product. What I'm saying is that when you buy a product you

should especially look for one feature: freedom.

http://fsf.org/ For more information about software freedoms please see

the Free Software Foundation's homepage.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Khyber]

Umm, Creative's HQ was based in California. The EULA Creative had on those driver was NULL AND VOID by California. Daniel had EVERY right to modify the software as he saw fit. I pointed this out to Creative's Lawyers, and they capitulated VERY FAST.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[iamacat]

Daniel_k had no right to modify Creative's software. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Care to explain how constitution, or a constitutional law of Daniel_k's states prohibits him from distributing patches to Creative's drivers, provided that he neither distributes patched drivers directly nor do the patches contain Creative's copyrighted code in excess of fair use amount needed for interoperability.

Now, it's possible that Daniel did not release his work properly, but he sure has "powers" to modify Creative's code.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Martin Blank]

I'm curious as to the foundations of this. You state that he had the right to modify the drivers, but did this give him the right to distribute them? And since Daniel lives in Brazil, how does this affect the EULA?

Mind you, I think Creative was a complete asshat over this, but the legal basis still intrigues me.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Khyber]

The EULA is still null and void, and many courts have found an EULA to be unenforcable, especially in the state that Creative's headquarters were in - California. There's legal precedent all over.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[hardburn]

That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work. It's only through a license agreement that you have any right to even use Creative's code. If the EULA is entirely null-and-void, then there's nothing else that gives you right to use it. Note that certain portions of an EULA wouldn't necessarily hold up in court (technically, they could say that you must sacrifice your firstborn on the Temple of Sho'ka'rei, but that doesn't mean it'd hold up in court), however there has to be something that gives you the right to use it.

Mind you, that all means nothing in the court of public opinion. While Creative might have had the legal right, their actions made them look like senseless bullies. It would have been far more productive to give the guy a job and release his changes officially.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Brummund]

Hey Richard, you need to turn off DOS mode in Emacs, we're getting double linefeeds here.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[plague3106]

Are you sure you understand copyright? You buy a book, you don't need a seperate license to read it. That's what you got by paying for the book. Software is no different, and when you buy a creative product you're buying hardware AND software.

Now, he doesn't have a right to distribute the software, but he probably has a right to distribute changes to it. If i tell my friends to read a book, and come up with a different ending, I'm allowed to tell them about it. I wouldn't be allowed to sell the book with one chapter replaced or anything.

What he should have done is release a program that changes a few bytes in the original file, not release a modified file. But your notion that you need a seperate license to use something you bought is obsurd, and I can modify the software all I like in the privacy of my home.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Hal_Porter]

It's more complex than that.

From here
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don't have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. 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. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make. Someone else put it like this -

1) The licence agreement which we all accept to says that we must not reverse engineer or tamper with the software as it is the property of Creative Labs.
2) I firmly believe that Daniel K has caught the flack because of the Dolby Digital feature As far as I am aware Auzentech paid a lot of money for an exclusive licence with Dolby to have their cards support this. Now, Creative would get into trouble if they allow a means for this to be "cracked" to run on non-Auzentech cards.
3) Accepting money (even in the form of donations) for someone elses copyrighted material is a big NO NO. Now let's suppose that he has a legal right to reverse engineer 1), and they are willing to ignore 3). There's still a problem with 2), that his drivers allow Dolby Digital on non Auzentech cards. It seems like Auzentech make cards based on the Creative chipset but they pay royalties to Dolby for some Dolby code/patents. The official Creative driver always has the code but only enables it on Auzentech cards.

Now Daniel_K comes along and enables the code on Creative cards. Dolby finds out and complains to Auzentech since they probably signed a contract that only allows them to use the technology on their cards. Auzentech complains to Creative who've signed a contract to enforce this in the driver. And things look bad for Creative, since they allowed him to post the crack on their forum.

So it's not the Vista driver he's in trouble for, it's unlocking Dolby on Creative cards.

That said, the traditional way to handle this is to negotiate in private not on some internet forum, offer the guy a job and so on. And release the missing Vista drivers.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[mlwmohawk]

That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work.

This is, of course, complete nonsense and exactly what the media companies want to to think. The mere act of an entity "publishing" i.e. making something available to the public, gives "the public" certain rights to that material. These rights are embodied by "fair use."

If you want more rights than fair use provides, then you need an agreement.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[HiThere]

This would be more like distributing a diff file that corrected typos. Still legal under US copyright law, I believe. Other countries might have differing rules. (E.g., a diff file requires short quotes before and after the change, and Australian copyright law reportedly has no "fair use" provision.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[GameMaster]

Ah, but he's not the one applying the patch and, therefore, he's not the one creating the derivative work. The end user is the one creating the derivative work and as long as they don't distribute the software to anyone else once they've done this then they aren't violating copyright laws.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Hydian]

That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work. It's only through a license agreement that you have any right to even use Creative's code. Huh? Copyrights work the same with or without licensing agreements and have been around for much longer than EULAs in any case. What gives you the right to use the code is the fact that you purchased it and/or that it was given to you by the copyright owner. The license agreement may or may not place further restrictions beyond the copyright laws upon your usage and those restrictions may or may not hold up in court, but that agreement has nothing to do with copyright laws directly.

If a license agreement was inherently required to use a copyrighted work, then you'd need one to listen to the radio, hang a piece of art on the wall, or read this post. It simply doesn't work that way.

Copyright law would pretty much only prevent him from distributing (which he did--no argument there) or publicly performing the work. What he does with it in the privacy of his own home is his business as long as he doesn't share the copyrighted work with others and he was granted those rights as soon as the copyright holder gave him a copy. The licensing agreement can restrict those rights (which is why licensing agreements exist) when he agrees to it, but that is a case of voluntarily giving up your rights and not one of being granted rights that you didn't already have.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Plekto]

[quote]
That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work. It's only through a license agreement that you have any right to even use Creative's code.
[/quote]

Minor changes are required:
"By default, you have no right to RESELL OR REPRESENT AS YOUR OWN someone else's copyrighted work." You can for instance, always make a parody work of something as well as make in-house fixes and edits and so on. And, as pointed out elsewhere, the EULA is null and void because you physically own the hardware and aren't renting it. You can always alter code or programming for any device that you own if you have the ability to do so. Be it a sound card or something as simple as an electrical box that needs an extra hole drilled in it.

Technically he can't distribute it without their blessing, but it's insanely stupid to nerf someone who just solved a problem for you for free. Shoot, if I was running Creative, I'd have hired the guy or made a serious offer. He obviously was brighter than the waste of resources in development.

Compare:
Creative nerfs programmer. Creative gets egg on face and retracts threats.
Programmer fixes Creative's bad code. Creative hires programmer.

Sounds to me like someone at Creative has been taking cues from Apple's playbook.

Liars or idiots (or both)

[Anonymous Coward]

If that was true then they should have given him well paid job and allow him to work on official sources of those drivers, this would not have caused any 3rd party issues as he would have been their employee.

Re:Liars or idiots (or both)

[ArcticCelt]

Yeah but the point here is that they voluntarily cripple their drivers because they don't want their old product to be fully compatible with Vista in hope that the customer will buy new hardware from them. It's not incompetence here, it's only a shitty evil corporate strategy.

Re:Liars or idiots (or both)

[kesuki]

From what i understand he took working XP drivers, tried them on vista, maybe did a little hex editing when they crashed, figured out ways to get them working without crashing, without needing to compile any code, but it took him months of formatting and reinstalling vista to get all the drivers working.

BTW with the exception of creative reinstating the forum links, all of this information was in the first article... about how he got mad at creative and did stuff to really piss them off, and even how he decided to remove the offending software, and keep modding just the 'approved' mods.

But yeah, seriously, if he was able to make working vista drivers in a few months when their own guys couldn't manage it,(and without having access to the source code either) they really should have offered him a job.

screw creative

[nuzak]

Fire the people who badgered him. No, not the legal folks, they're just doing their due diligence, but the PM's who decided it was okay to actually harrass and intimidate the guy.

An apology and an announcement of a policy change from here forward would also work.

Otherwise, all I see is that they got caught and decided they'd just try other means to shut down unauthorized, uh, "unbreaking". There's also the whole deliberate breakage to begin with.

As things stand right now, my only outstanding question for resolving the Creative debacle is "Turtle Beach or m-Audio?"

Too little, too late

[mrmeval]

Release uncrippled drivers now.

It's not just me that won't buy your products it's every computer I build, it's every person I talk to, it's every decision my company makes that I can sway against you, it's every law I can turn against you.

Re:Too little, too late

[N1ck0]

Or even better, just publish some specs on your hardware and chipsets and say 'developers are welcome to implement their own unofficial drivers/software a) just don't expect creative labs support b) don't mod our intellectual property just go develop your own'

Miserable excuses by Creative

[TheHawke]

They just grate on my nerves, saying that their drivers are hung up in the Vista approval process. I'd say that they are just buying time to release new products so they can make more profit off of NEW product instead of spending cash on support for old. The pattern shows in the forums as well as their support pages.
I've seen more than a few companies simply bypass vista's certification process and release their updates, with instructions on how to circumvent Vista security checks. Good for them, bad for vista.

An Excuse Breathes Its Last and Croaks

[hyades1]

Lord knows I'm no fan of Vista, but it seems to me that Creative was trying to lay their own incompetence or dishonest marketing plans off on Microsoft. They must have been pretty embarrassed when this guy came along with a set of working drivers to blow their alibi out of the water. I sincerely hope the people who made the decision to harass him are shown the door in a very public way. Proper damage control requires on less.

Not really

[Moraelin]

Not really. They had quite a bit of horsepower on their chips to add hardware acceleration to that processing. Now I'm not saying that they're necessarily a good company, or good drivers, and the latency is AFAIK more fit for games than for recording music in real time anyway. Just pointing out that the "The SB probably does it all in software anyway" assumption is false. Out of the games-oriented consumer-level cards, theirs actually do the least in software by far.

Re:Too late for Creative

[Ephemeriis]

The card in my system will be the LAST Creative product I own

I gave up on Creative a couple years ago. I've had tons of trouble with their drivers and eventually just decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

Does anyone know of any other company that doesn't use Creative hardware or chipsets in their sound cards where I can plug my guitar in and have access to pitch-shifting, chorus, flange, auto-wah, like the old SBLive! 5.1 had in their EAX control panel?

Since all I use my sound for is gaming, and I've just got some cheap desktop stereo speakers, I've been using the on-board sound for a while now.

Previously, however, I had a lot of luck with Turtle Beach sound cards. Very good sound quality and a lot less driver trouble. I've never done any professional sound work though, nor plugged a guitar into anything, so I have no idea if their cards would work for you.

Re:Too late for Creative

[glavenoid]

As a fellow guitarist, I think you'd be much better off obtaining a dedicated unit. I've since quit using effects, so I'm not really familiar with the market these days, but I do know that the sonic qualities of some of the Zoom and Boss multi-units have gotten better in the last few years. Did the SBLive! allow to pitch shift in key, or just some arbitrary interval? The nice things about some of the dedicated pitch shifters is that they allow both diatonic interval pitch-shifting (which is of course important)and arbitrary. Maybe I'm thinking old Electro-Harmonics here?.

Let's be clear here

[g051051]

While I respect his skills, Daniel_K didn't actually write replacement drivers that did things Creative couldn't...he reverse engineered the existing drivers and patched out the OS level checks, or he swapped parts of code from other drivers into play, to enable features that were specifically disabled by Creative. He then made those modified, repackaged drivers available, which is a big problem for Creative, and the reason why they tried to shut Daniel_K down.

Re:Let's be clear here

[Professor_UNIX]

If he was just taking drivers that worked in Windows XP, then why would Creative have purposefully disabled that functionality in their Vista drivers? If some guy can pretty easily reverse engineer the drivers for another OS and get them working on a newer version then I would think Creative, with the source code in hand, should easily be able to make that functionality work on Vista. Why is Creative disabling this functionality if the device and OS is capable of supporting it? Are they just trying to sell new cards? I doubt that's the answer since it seems like some of the cards he's talking about are relatively recent and claim Vista support.

Re:Let's be clear here

[gatzke]

Why should that be a big problem for Creative? They sell hardware and provide drivers. He made better drivers. If anything, Creative should have taken his drivers and repackaged them as their own. Maybe even compensated him for doing their work for them.

The actions of Creative may have been business motivated. Cripple the hardware so you have to buy new hardware. Bad idea.

Re:Let's be clear here

[TimboJones]

My takeaway from this has been that Creative cards on Vista are technically capable of supporting advanced, proprietary audio features, but not legally allowed to support these features without... licensing fees?

Re:Let's be clear here

[Todd Knarr]

It's a problem for Creative because often they use identical hardware for multiple sound cards, with the drivers determining which features are active. For instance, they may sell the UltiSound Basic with 5.1 surround for $150, and the UltiSound Extreme with 7.1 and Dolby output for $300. If you look carefully at the cards, they're absolutely 100% hardware-identical. Even the jacks are identical and wired up the same. In other words, the UltiSound Basic is quite capable of outputting 7.1 and Dolby just like the Extreme. The only difference is in a small EPROM chip with the model ID in it. The driver reads that and uses the model ID to decide which firmware to load into the card, and it won't load the 7.1/Dolby-capable firmware into a card with a Basic model ID. If someone hacks the drivers to change the check, then Creative finds their Extreme card not selling very well since everybody's buying the Basic and turning on the high-end features.

They also tend to deprecate their low-end cards on new versions of Windows, forcing people to buy upgraded hardware if they want to upgrade their OS. If hacked drivers allow people to keep using their older hardware, Creative loses sales.

Yes, both tactics are stupid. But to Creative hacked drivers are a threat to a business model based on those tactics. They just discovered here that the PR backlash may be a bigger threat.

Re:Let's be clear here

[Shados]

The point is that Creative could do it all along: what this guy did was remove OS checks from the drivers. That is, the drivers literally did: "IF OS == Vista, break the cool features so we can force people to upgrade hardware and other nasty things". He took that out, more or less, and thus the drivers worked.

No leg to stand on anyway: Tortuous Interference

[mlwmohawk]

I wrote the last time this came up that Daniel did nothing wrong. All he did is phrase his donations plea poorly.

Since the drivers he made available were generally available anyway, he did not run afoul of copyright for making his changes available. (assuming he uses the words "for support work" and not "for the drivers") He could use "patch" just to be 100% sure.

As a consultant I can (and have done) modify third party hardware and software for the benefit of a customer who has proper ownership of the hardware and license to the software and I may change for that service and there's NOTHING the third party vendor can do about it.

The relationship Daniel has with the user of a driver with his modifications is of no business to Creative. In fact, Creative may be worried that they are interfering with Daniels business. If you are curious look up "Tortuous Interference."

Daniel *did* make money from his work. He could have a case against Creative's very public accusation.

Re:No leg to stand on anyway: Tortuous Interferenc

[Shados]

I didnt check, but it depends. Did he make modified drivers available, or did he make diff/patch availables that users can apply themselves? If the former, he played in dangerous territory.

I didn't even though these drivers existed

[goldcd]

until I saw all of this kick off. Downloaded them, installed them and my Audigy2 ZS behaves better. Also my ancient Audigy drivers (also Creative's latest version) were noted as being the reason Vista SP1 refused to install. Swapped out for the modded ones, and next day SP1 pops up for autoupdate. In all seriousness I'd never touch a Creative soundcard ever again. Had SB1, SB Pro, SB16, AWE32 etc etc - only breaking away for a brief flirtation with a Gravis Ultrasound (lovely lovely card, but software support was a pain in the arse). In this new age of 'sound being taken for granted' I'd initially just used onboard audio, but then realized it was a bit cheap and nasty (I don't need 7.1 - and the hiss is driving me insane). Anyhoo - I don't like onboard, creative take the piss out of their customers (ffs they insist on mailing me the most stupidly overpriced 'offers' after a mistakenly gave them my email). What're the alternatives? Xonar?

Onboard sound = poor ASIO

[DigitAl56K]

Onboard sound is fine for most applications, but it is not suitable for audio enthusiasts such as musicians who need low latency ASIO. The ASIO implementation on most on-board chipsets (that I have used) is atrocious to the point of being unusable.

I partially agree with you.

[goldcd]

I bought my Audigy2 ZS when I had XP - and I was happy. Then 'upgraded' to Vista after checking drivers were there and erm it all went to shit a bit. Now previously (and for every other Vista driver) my hardware did the same thing, but just used a different driver. Creative (and they seem to have partially admitted this) decided that forcing users onto a new driver was a perfect way to make people buy some new Creative hardware, by deliberately hobbling the post-upgrade driver to attempt to force a hardware upgrade. Legally Creative are right - no question. Morally they're scum. What really bugs me is that there's some poor tech guy trying to make a decent Vista driver and f'in marketing have waded in and forced him to screw it up. Creative used to have my loyalty and this whole mess and caused them to lose it. Interesting bit is to see how they respond to it all - hopefully somebody's getting a P45 over this and decent 'official' drivers may appear soon (current lastest driver is from March last year - so prior to all this, they seemingly saw no reason to do anything).

They ought to start by...

[cptdondo]

shitcanning the VP who approved this stuff. Publicly. Then issuing a public apology.

Anyone who gets this heavy-handed in today's internet society is far out of touch with his/her customer base, and has no reason to be employed by a company that makes computer equipment.

In other words, incompetent to the point of being actively harmful to the well-being and even survival of the company itself.