Creative Goes After Driver Modder

By p858snake
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Grand Master

p858snake

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Posted

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 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."

Source:Slashdot

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https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/628428-creative-goes-after-driver-modder/
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CaptainSlow

Posted
Posted

I was reading about this on the Creative forums yesterday and I have to say its bad news for the creative customers. It just comes to show much of a bunch of money grabbing rip-off merchants creative actually are.

I currently have an X-Fi, which is the last soundcard I get from creative!

Grand Master

DrCheese

Posted
Posted (edited)

oh damn it, I have his drivers installed now and have made my Audigy 2 decent under Vista. I installed it under a temp account whist I was setting my system up so I don't think I have the installer anymore which is annoying. I nearly went and downloaded it again the other day to keep it in case I ever need to reinstall but I didn't >.<

Creative are a bunch of idiots and I'm never buying any of there products again, If they had put as much effort into driver development as this guy has it wouldn't be so bad.

Edited by DrCheese
Grand Master

GrimReeper

Posted
Posted
it's available on the P2P network.

Anyway, i think they banned and removed it, because they think it's somekind of trojanware :wacko:

I guess noone of the Creative team checked the drivers if they really work...

What do u mean by "i think they banned and removed it" the P2P network or Creative. Creative would have probably checked out the drivers and probably knows that they do work but if you went read the forum post that is linked in the slashdot post it isnt about if the drivers worked or not. It was because he was using there IP and they consider his modding to be theft of there IP.

Haha, check the thread on the Creative forums [link]. It's quite impressive that nobody supports Creative in this decision (but not surprising).

Creative really have hurt them seleves in this market, for sure.

I guess if they released 2 hardware identically cards with different drivers people would always opt for the cheaper one and use the modified drivers which in essence would make Creative lose money on its sale. Although banning Daniel_K will probably hurt the brands reputation more than his IP theft would have cost them.

Grand Master

DrCheese

Posted
Posted

hmpf, I agree that it was wrong that he was trying to get donations for it, Creative really had no choice I guess to stop him because of that, especially as they had "apparently" licensed some of the tech from other companies.

If only creative stopped making such a mess of there own drivers. The amount of bad PR they have got out of all the mess with the vista drivers is insane.

All of this is down to Creative having a monopoly in the standalone sound card market. None of this would have happened if creative had any decent competition. I'm glad that finally other companies like Acer and Asus are starting to step up.

Grand Master

tiagosilva29

Posted
Posted (edited)
Wait, so this guy improved and fixed their software (i.e. he did their job) for free, and they've banned it?!?

I think someone's brain at Creative is being overly "creative" about this.

It's Creative. What did you expected?

<snip>

I see, so...

  • let a guy do their job
  • learn from the guy (that would be surprising)
  • guy starts requesting donations, buys new cards and equipament or food, who cares?
  • hold it... let the guy make more stuff
  • learn enough for a couple of updates, and then kill the guy

Sounds perfectly sane to me.

Edited by tiagosilva29
Grand Master

PGHammer

Posted
Posted
It's Creative. What did you expected?

I think the issue with Daniel_K has to do with his modified Vista ISO for the Audigy series of sound cards (includes classic Audigy, but not Audigy SE, and the entire Audigy 2 line, including the ZS subseries): Daniel_K included ALchemy Audigy Edition, which Creative charges Audigy owners $9.95 for. That would indeed (legally) constitute IP theft per the law. That may be, indeed, the entire issue between Creative and Daniel_K (who has been a regular contributor in Creative's Sound Blaster and Windows Vista forums); he also made no secret of this in his posts in said forums (so it's not like Creative was unaware of what he was doing).

What surprises me was that Creative took so long to bounce him (despite his inna-your-face attitude).

I will also hazard a guess that a lot of the griping over Daniel_K's ejection is coming from Audigy owners that are running Windows Vista.

(The only comment I will make vis-a-vis the Daniel_K situation is as follows: despite having used (and, in fact, having recommended) his modified Vista ISO for the Audigy sound cards (entirely because of the ease of use compared to downloading the individual items from Creative one at a time), I did wind up purchasing an X-Fi (specifically, the new-design XtremeGamer) for completely unrelated reasons.)

Grand Master

Rigby

Posted
Posted

Any decent company would have offered him a job. He obviously does it better than the talentless hacks they have working for them. Creative isn't a decent company though, I learned that years ago. They've been screwing their customers for years now. The whole charging customers for Alchemy nonsense just highlighted that. It's a shame they bought out and/or killed all of the competing sound card companies and standards. That's why they've been able to sit back doing nothing for so long and get away with it.

Mentor

NiceCarpet

Posted
Posted (edited)

Haha, oh wow read the thread posted by Harreh.

Creative has a rather large fire on their hands, called for or not.

Also don't you find it odd that with big company forums once there is a surge in angry people no one is around to answer any questions or comment on anything. Epic played the same way with the GoW 'crash and lose your saves' problem.

Edited by NiceCarpet
Experienced

MMaster23

Posted
Posted

it's not too surprising that creative did what they did.... the modified packages contains software written by creative which you're aren't allowed to modify and then publish.

also creative can't garrantue his modified drivers will work as they should.

(not that theirs always do .. oh well :))

Creative could get sued if anyone uses drivers modified by someone else then Creative but carries the Creative logo/brand. In the end .. creative is responsible.

If you were Creative, and you were sensible, you would do the same.

That said .. Vista brings new audio architectures which make it hard for Creative to optimize every driver.

Sure you can hack them sloppy .. however .. this often produces more problems then it fixes.

I use an Audigy2 Ext Plat. for my main MCE downstairs .. everything works as it should .. DTS, DD, etc.

Loving X-Fi Crystalizer on Vista workstation. I had some problems with some games about a year ago but the drivers have been stable for over 6 months now

Grand Master

GrimReeper

Posted
Posted
it's not too surprising that creative did what they did.... the modified packages contains software written by creative which you're aren't allowed to modify and then publish.

also creative can't garrantue his modified drivers will work as they should.

(not that theirs always do .. oh well :) )

Creative could get sued if anyone uses drivers modified by someone else then Creative but carries the Creative logo/brand. In the end .. creative is responsible.

If you were Creative, and you were sensible, you would do the same.

That said .. Vista brings new audio architectures which make it hard for Creative to optimize every driver.

Sure you can hack them sloppy .. however .. this often produces more problems then it fixes.

I use an Audigy2 Ext Plat. for my main MCE downstairs .. everything works as it should .. DTS, DD, etc.

Loving X-Fi Crystalizer on Vista workstation. I had some problems with some games about a year ago but the drivers have been stable for over 6 months now

Yeah thats all well and good but Daniel_K could tell that might be a potential problem and made people well aware that the drivers are not made by creative, not supported by creative and you use them at your own risk, dunno if this would stand up in court. If you tried to sue Creative because the drivers dont work Creative could just say they didnt encourage the use of his drivers and that if they had used official drivers the problems (reason of being sued) wouldnt have occured. I think it was not because of them doing some responsible or because of legal reasons but merely because they want more money by forcing people into paying for drivers instead and/or buying new hardware.

Rising Star

Burned

Posted
Posted
oh damn it, I have his drivers installed now and have made my Audigy 2 decent under Vista. I installed it under a temp account whist I was setting my system up so I don't think I have the installer anymore which is annoying. I nearly went and downloaded it again the other day to keep it in case I ever need to reinstall but I didn't >.<

Creative are a bunch of idiots and I'm never buying any of there products again, If they had put as much effort into driver development as this guy has it wouldn't be so bad.

The answer to your problem:

http://www.drivermagician.com/Lite.htm

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