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Creative Labs to open SB Live Drivers
Several people wrote to us to let us know that Creative Labs has decided to make the drivers for their Soundblaster Live open source. They made the announcement and also said they will be setting up a CVS/Bugzilla system to aid in development. Jon Taylor, of S3 and nVidia fame, along with several other coders have been asked to oversee the development. Additionally, they confirmed that they are working with Lokisoft to work Environmental Audio and "3D
Audio" on the Linux platform. Lokisoft makes most of the uber-cool games for Linux.
Alot of people aren't going to get the significance of this announcement--they'll think, "Cool, another sound card that I can play with on Linux w/o resorting to closed source drivers."
This is beyond that.
The SB Live is based on a single, ridiculously powerful and extremely programmable DSP. Almost all functions the chipset performs are executed in DSP level software, meaning suddenly Linux is getting full specs on a complete digital processing environment.
The impacts of this are substantial. The SB Live chipset is cheap enough that it's a contender for "standard sound" in many machines. Open source algorithms for everything from MP3 encoding to analog synth simulation to the more esoteric, non-sound related stuff(GIMP graphical filters, datastream analysis, etc.) should, if the drivers are clean enough, start popping up over time.
The uses of such a powerful digital signal processor on an open platform are honestly unpredictable at this point in time. While there are hardcoded design issues in the SB Live chipset(most notably, all signals are upsampled to 48khz before processing may occur), the sheer flexibility of this chipset will blow Linux programmers out of the water.
This is truly excellent news, and shouldn't be ignored as a mere fun thing for the gamers to play with. If only 3D graphics hardware was as programmable...or as open.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Use any PCL3 driver. The printer will still work. The printer specific drivers for windows are usually just a different picture so the user sees the printer they bought on the screen.
If you ever have driver trouble with a HP Laser, select LaserJet 4 - always works because it's straight PCL 5, no extra crap.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
A bit more thought on this: :-). They're actually going the extra mile and providing not only the source but a development environment for coders to come, watch, and learn.
Wow, creative is setting up CVS/Bugzilla. They're not merely opening the source; they're not just trying to grasp a bit of extra PR out of the Linux mindshare gods(Taco and Hemos
This is amazing, and deserves a retrospective profile in around six months to see how this great, precedent setting experiment panned out.
Of course, Creative isn't dumb. As I mentioned in another post, Creative stands to have their card become the standard DSP component in innumerable Linux machines--their foresight in developing a programmable sound card is very likely to pay off handsomely in increased sales.
The economics of Open Source just got much more interesting.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The comcept of having custom dsp algoritms would rock very much, but I dont think its gonna happen. Creative will probable ship the DSP-code as a binary as many users have stated before, and this is logical, because they probably dont want to "give away" the sourcecode of their nice reverbs and stuff, even if its quite dependant of the EM10K1 dsp, it could surely be rewritten to use on other processors..
But I really hope Im wrong, and there could be other possibilities too, that they provide their algorithms as precompiled libraries or something but keeping other parts of the DSP code open..
Let's try to remember that Linux isn't the only OS that will gain from this step by Creative. The *BSDs, Solaris, and more will all win. And not just x86 architectures... PCI-based SPARCs, Alphas, and PowerPCs, which Creative never considered "cost effective" to develop drivers for, will finally have an option aside from the horrid on-board sound.
:) )
I'm endlessly pleased by this. Now, to work on them to release specs for their DXR decoders and the like. (Give an inch, take a mile.
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
that they're now opening their top of the line hardware drivers too.
Yay, this makes me even more happy that I chose a soundcard by A3D, hoping to support competition rather than the market leader, when I bought my computer way back when. A year later, and now those who chose SB Live's have a opensource drivers, and what do I have? A $30 closed source (crippled and buggy) solution from Opensound, and Aureal support claiming they might have drivers out "towards the end of 1999" (though they also claim they will be "more open-source" whatever that means).
Never the less, I am not bitter. It's great that Creative are seeing the light here, and I hope that more companies (cough, cough) could follow in their footsteps. It just feels so wrong that the only way to get good sound support in Linux is to support a huge company with a defacto monopoly in this area. That was sort of what I was trying to get away from...
-
I recall reading in one of ESR's essays that the release of driver source code is a logical and beneficial step for hardware manufacturers: they benefit from having the open source community to working on it, while effectively broadening the range of operating systems their hardware can run on. Hopefully, other hardware manufacturers will emulate Creative in this move towards open source. The point is, hardware companies generally don't make money from their drivers: they make money from pushing their hardware for sale to you, the consumer. I foresee that more Linux users will want an SBLive! now. =)
my 2 cents.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
its great that Creative has released these drivers, but the coolest part of the announcement is the possibility of the creation of some sort of universal sound API out of the Loki/Creative collaboration...
it would definitely be nice to have sound programming be as easy to use as network programming...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Grrr. my nick is "Forward the Light Brigade"...
I will never doubt an AC again. I thought you were lying, but after about 5 minutes I came up with this!!!!!!!
OK, I guess the cat is out of the bag now. Like the article says,
Creative is opening the sources to the existing SBLive (Emu10K1,
technically) Linux kernel driver. The current sourcebase is what would
have been release as beta4 of the driver, with 4-speaker support (stereo
mirroring only at present) and SPDIF output being the main changes from
beta3. Also being released are beta sources for a DXR2 driver which
were donated to Creative by Andrew de Quincey (thanks, Andrew!). The
source for both projects will be released under the GPL. We are
planning to submit kernel patches as soon as possible, after the
open-source development community has had a chance to beat on the driver
sources for a bit and whip them into shape.
Also as the article mentioned, Creative is going to launch an
open-source development support site with FAQs, CVS repositiories,
CVSWeb tracking, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and all the other standard
open source project website services. The site will be up and running
sometime early next week - PLEASE do not overload
developer.soundblaster.com with repeated checks to see if the site is up
yet, OK? We'll announce loud and clear when the server goes live.
So, that's where things stand as of Friday evening. All of us here at
Creative are really excited about this, and we have all worked hard to
get to this point. Huge numbers of people have been asking for the
source since we announced the driver development project early this
year. Many of those same e-mails were from people who wanted to be able
to hack the driver sources themselves. Well, here's what you all have
been asking for all year, and what we promised you back in February.
Happy hacking!
Jon Taylor
Linux Driver Engineer
Creative Labs
jtaylor@creativelabs.com
After reading the article, it seems that Creative will have two sets of driver for linux. They will have their official "binary-only" driver, and the Open Source(tm) driver.
This is a first. Where a company not only released their source for a driver, but are also making their only closed driver. Creative, and any other company, will see first-hand at what opening up source will do. Because they will have something to test it against with the binary-only driver that Creative is making.
In a couple months, Creative will realease their new binary-only driver and say "our driver does this, that, and the otherthing", and whoever is taking up the Open Source lead will go"our driver does all of that, is more stable at doing it, and has features that you never would have though of"
Let's hope that other companies see the light of what opening up drivers can do. Not only does it make for a better product, but I bet opening the drivers sold about a couple hundred thousand SB Live! cards to linux users that would have sooner pissed on the card yesterday then bought one due to linux support and drivers.
I'd just add that these Win-Devices are a bad idea even when you are using a supported OS. With a normal printer you can troubleshoot problems by just dumping plain text to the parallel port. In addition, since the drivers are more complicated there is more chance that they won't work when you upgrade your OS or may conflict with other software on your system. Of course since these are normally cheap devices the odds that the vendor will spend the money to update their drivers are lower as well. You can also forget using drivers for some other "compatable" device until yours is fully supported (how many printers are there that can use either Epson or HP drivers in a pinch?)
I've always felt that Aureal's Vortex cards were better technology than the SB Live, but with this announcement I might get an SB Live anyway. Currently, the only way to get any sound support in Linux with a Vortex or Vortex 2 is by purchasing the OSS sound drivers (and even then it's only beta). I actually did this for the Vortex 1 I have now, and I have been thinking about upgrading to a Vortex 2 soon. But even when the drivers are out of beta this won't give you 3D sound in Linux, just regular sound. It seams that Aureal is beginning to take the Linux market more seriously as they have announced they will develop their own Linux drivers which will be available for free, but they still won't be open and at this point all we have is a promise. They may very well delay the drivers as companies often do.
Compare this to Creative, who are now not only announcing that their already available (and free) drivers will be made open, but they are also planning on actually implementing 3D sound in Linux. I don't particularily like Creative, but you've got to love this!
As I said before, I think Aureal has better hardware. And their 3D sound is considerably more sophisticated as they implement "wavetracing" in which the path of the sound wave is actually modelled. But does this matter if they don't have 3D sound support in Linux? OK, 3D sound is mostly used in games and most games are still in windoze, so I pretty much have windoze on my computer for the sole purpose of playing games. Lack of 3D sound in Linux didn't bother me before because there were nothing in Linux that could actually take advantage of it. This situation is thankfully starting to change. 3D video support in Linux is improving by leaps and bounds and many more games are being made available for Linux. But until now there just hasn't been any 3D sound.
So, just in case anyone from Aureal is here, if you don't offer something comparable my next sound card will be a SB Live even though I think it's inferior technology and I don't like Creative. OK?
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
You can try to use my aureal driver (available as a kernel patch for 2.2.13) at http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~zivav/vortex.
Only the mixer is supported, so it is not yet very useful, but that's a start.
When I bought my latest computer last year, I naively decided to get a SB Live! since it seemed like such a cool card, and it was by Creative, so how could there not be Linux drivers for it?
When I discovered there were no drivers, and that Creative was not releasing the specifications, I was understandably disappointed. After the first beta drivers came out, I could at least get some sound out of the card. But some games didn't work with it, and it still had less functionality than the AWE32 driver. So my younger brother got a free upgrade from AWE32 to SB Live!, and I got a free downgrade that gave me more functionality. If the driver at that time had been open source, I honestly would have spent my whole summer hacking it to do cool stuff.
My point? This is a VERY SMART MOVE by Creative. There are a LOT of DSP hackers in college, just itching to write cool DSP code. Sound has been an often neglected field of hacking. We are on the verge of a Renaissance in sound. Under Linux, there is a good abstraction layer between the programmer and the soundcard. All the demo programmers, trackers, general code hackers, etc. are coming to Linux. The Linux crew has traditionally been made up of more 'mature' programmers. But with the rise in popularity of Linux, the migration is inevitable. And these people will bring new ideas of what is "cool" to program. Look for lots of cool sound programs in the next couple years.
No, YOU'RE wrong. WinPrinters are a special class of hardware (similar to WinModems) that require a (currently) Windows-only driver developed by the manufacturer in order to work. And don't say something like "Well, why doesn't someone write a driver themselves?", because it's damn near impossible.
The reason I say that is because printers normally contain a bundle of hardware to handle interpreting the commands sent from the computer, buffering data, in some cases handling rasterizing, etc. For example, an old Epson printer would buffer and interpret commands in the Esc/P language, which meant that you could write a driver that output Esc/P (the specifics of which were generally available to the public) and send it to the printer. In the case of PostScript, all the computer has to do is throw the PostScript file (which can be plain ASCII) at the printer - the printer would buffer the PS data (in higher-end printers, the buffer might be 8MB or more), rasterize it (usually with a RISC processor dedicated to the task) and then print the end result.
Of course, all of that costs money, so some bright spark came up with the idea of WinPrinters, which are basically only a buffer. The computer does everything else - command interpretation, rasterizing, whatever - and blasts the result at the printer in pure binary form, ready for printing. This means that unless you have a VERY precise idea of what binary data the printer is expecting, you don't have a hope in hell of writing a driver, not to mention that doing all the work on the computer side can be quite a strain for older machines.
Then they will find out that have definately have gotten at least one more new SB Live customer, ... and possibly developer!
I have a 6x/3dxr DVD decoder kit, and I've been dieing to couple it to the SB Live (so I get four speaker output.) The Linux angle was the only thing holding me back.
The only question now is... Regular or Platinum?
Is it released already? I thought that they said that CVS and Bugzilla is not going to ready for at least a week, or so.
--
The other problem is that some manufacturers, here in europe at least, will mark a printer as "windows" if it only includes a parallel port, and "windows+mac" if it includes a parallel and serial interface. Some of the printers marked "windows only" actually work fine on linux.
For example, the Epson Stylus Color 640 does not differ much from the old 600, except that it leaves out some of the more obscure ESC/P2 commands, but it is badged "windows only"...It worked fine on my amiga, let alone linux...
This is different to the "WinPrinter" models you describe, which are marked, often with identical logos, as "windows only". This can get very irritating, as I'm sure you can imagine - but we can blame it all on microsoft - they push the "windows printer" mark, presumably to encourage lock-in....
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I read the ga-source article on this, a open-source and a binary. Doesn't this mean that they are going to make a opensource driver that uses the binary file yo the actualy program Live prosessor? It feels more open than it actually is, no actual programming specs for the prosessor...
Or then the other possibility will be that there will be a full and limited opensource driver and a different binary driver with more features.
But don't get me wrong, it's a good thing they make drivers for linux and even make a 3d sound api, but I really would like to see how you program that live prosessor (and do something weird with it)..
This makes a lot of sense for everyone. Creative makes excellent hardware. Software (drivers) is not their core business. By opening the source under an appropriate licence (I believe GPL in this case), they get access to a all the benefits of open source development (thousands of skilled programmers, many eyes to spot bugs etc)
What they risk is that it makes it a bit easier for their competitors to reverse engineer their products. This is a very small risk. I am sure their competitors are quite capable of reverse engineering without the source.
The benefit is that this could give them a serious competitive edge. Their drivers should become significantly better than those of their closed-source competitors. They also stand to gain a significant amount of customer loyalty from Linux geeks.
This should allow them to increase their focus on producing great hardware.
I am a bit disappointed that they haven't opened the source to their drivers for other platforms. I suspect this is because they don't think there are enough open-source Win32 programmers. I think they are wrong on this. However, with the Linux source it should be possible (not easy, but possible) to write drivers for Windoze etc. if we want to.
I hope other hardware manufacturers follow. I have seen several brilliant bits of hardware totally compromised by shoddy drivers.
As you might or might now know, I'm running a
SB Live! under Linux page, I just have some things
I like to say..
A lot of ppl already know, Creative went a long, long way from releasing a binary only kernel specific driver, developing at a slow speed with loads of bugs, towards finally even having a FAQ and supporting CVS under GPL and supporting
people who wants to make their own driver under Linux. I you look at Creative, at first being not willing to provide 4front with the nessary information, to continue development and also not seeming to understand the need of having the source available or chopping up the driver into a kernel independant part with source
and a binary part for the DSP
(just check my page on the details..)
that's a big difference...
And Creative also didn't spend much resources
on Linux, because that's not where to money comes
from (We don't buy any Live Ware 3 or whatever upgrades)
But it now seems like Creative fully changed course and is also spending more resources on this thing (also with hiring Jon Taylor, a very good move) they even are working on finding a way
to support 3D audio or EAX, since Aureal thinks,
that's up to Creative, this is a very important step...
I think this move looks very good, also since
Aureal is also working on Linux support,
it really shows that times are changing for Linux
and that even heavy commercial compagnies like
Creative are realizing this..
This is sure much more than I ever hoped for
and to be honest, after seeing a message that
someone was going to buy a SB Live! because he
saw that there was at least a page that supported
it, was almost a reason for me to dismantle it.
Because I only started this page out of the frustration, not being given any support from Creative (like a FAQ or proper install instructions)..
Manuel Beunder (also going under MBr)
http://www.euronet.nl/~mailme
The SB Live! Linux page
I'm sure that some compliments couldn't hurt their commitment to making the SB Live! work better with Linux (and other OSes, by the way). Pat them on their collective head and tell them they've been good. :)
Comments developer relations can be emailed to dev-questions@creative.com or submitted by web at http://developer.soundblaster.com/feedb ack/.
If anyone has any other addresses which may be appropriate, feel free to post 'em!
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
At last!
I'm proud to say that I've mailed SoundBlaster at least twice to tell them politely that I think they should OpenSource their drivers, pointing at other companies doing so, at the ALSA team's (admirable and steadfast) refusal to use the emu10k1 code as long as it isn't opened to the public, and at what they've got to loose (nothing, or close to it).
What they achieve by doing this is, at least, that I won't throw my SB Live out the window and buy a card from a company that's opensourced their drivers. And, as many others have pointed out, it's a public stunt, and probably gives them a feather in the hat on Wall Street as well. I don't care that they didn't OpenSource the Windows drivers, and I think it's appropriate too, as Windows itself isn't particulary OpenSource. Let them have their model, and we will have ours.
What I really wrote in to say is that if you have a piece of hardware, whose spesifications isn't released, you shold go to the website of the companiy that made it, search out the appropriate email address, and write them (politely!) about it, explaining the need, the motivation and the reward. Customer feedback is important fuel for decision making.
After all, without customers....
The Trident 4D Wave cards are better and cheaper.
Trident has been open longer, and help writting ALSA.
If you don't want to compile the kernel yourself, just wait a couple more days - we're aware of the release, and we're already building a kernel RPM that has the driver.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
What about HP's drivers for their newer printers? I have a 712C and would love to have it work under Linux. Don't tell me to write it myself, because I'm not quite there yet (working on it). It seems with the interest HP has taken in the "Open Source" movement, they would be interested in this. They would also sell more printers :-) I do know that Linux Mandrake has Alpha/Beta drivers for it.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
As large-scale vendors slowly move to add linux to their list of preloaded OSes. Perhaps they requested a driver from Creative. "Or we will have to use another Card" As it would be in Dell's or Gateway's best interest to limit the number of soundcards they have on hand.
Get a free ipod.