Creative Goes After Driver Modder

[Eric Veteran]

Creative has backtracked after the huge backlash. (I sent the a scathing private e-mail as well.) They have replaced Daniel_K's driver package threads including all download links but sans donation link and are considering allowing the donations as well.

[Typhon]

Creative was a respectable company back in 1999 and 2000. Then they did that crap Audigy 5.1, Audigy2 6.1, Audigy2ZS 7.1, ****ed me off. I got the Audigy then the Audigy2 came out then the ZS what the hell?? Even though the ZS was a good card, I did not buy it till I could get it for $40. Now the x-fi cards are $100+ what ever happened to $35 to $50 cards like the Sound Blaster Live 5.1. Now that was a card, it lasted for years up till 2004 I would say.

I can now even recall a lot of people complaining about creative drivers in 2003. Thank god for youp pax drivers.

[b1kshad0w]

I was never truely impressed with creative.

[chconline Veteran]

They should hire this guy. They need a new driver team anyway.

[Digitalx]

There we go gave them a piece of my mind. http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/bo...=116498#M116498

[rajputwarrior]

anyone have a link to the drivers? maybe a PM?

[Sethos]

Glad i decided to boycott Creative's horrible products years ago :/

[Digitalx]

http://digg.com/hardware/Creative_threatens_community_modder dugg

[vomit]

I recently upgraded my pc and decided to use Vista full time, i was VERY disapointed to fin that the latest driver offering for my X-FI from creative labs was little if any better than the ones that were about when i was toying with rc1 and rc2. I was so anoyed that i have changed the sound card for an asus xonar at a cost of another ?100 on the build cost of the pc.

I WILL NEVER EVER BUY ANOTHER CREATIVE LABS PRODUCT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Express]

The built-in motherboard sound chipset is very capable ever since the release new Intel High-definition audio specification 'Azalia'

I don't see the point of most people getting third-party sound cards nowadays.

Azalia is a huge improvement over the older AC97 spec.

[Denis W. Veteran]

Well f*** me sideways, they can give us all this BS about Vista screwing up this and that but do nothing to bring back features XP users enjoyed that were removed from their drivers. Like uh, CMSS Stereo Surround? Or an equalizer that I NEVER SAW for XP or Vista that was supplied with these drivers?

But to be honest I was surprised they chose to be so silent until now. But:

Creative has backtracked after the huge backlash. (I sent the a scathing private e-mail as well.) They have replaced Daniel_K's driver package threads including all download links but sans donation link and are considering allowing the donations as well.

... thanks for the heads up. I'll see if the links I posted in the Vista Support forum a few months ago still work.

I might have to admit that he probably crossed the line by offering ALchemy for free to users, but when Creative decides to force Audigy users to pay and not X-Fi users for ALchemy support then BIG SURPRISE users are going to be ****ed off.

[O.G]

The drivers should still be available from FileFront uploaded by daniel_k under the username braziliantech. If they have been removed from filefront, they are currently available from either The Pirate Bay or Isohunt. The release title is Creative.Soundblaster.Audigy.Series.Vista.Drivers[by.daniel_k], info hash 2e1631215b72c946610721723e5b5cf04eaa505e. Included is the latest Vista 32/64 driver pack and the previous XP/Vista Unofficial Driver CD. Both are untouched and are as uploaded to filefront.

[Argi]

There's a torrent going around the place as well. To be honest in times like these you just leak the source and let others continue work on it.

[Argi]

I can't edit my previous post, but according to Engadget he's being allowed to continue development "as long as no intellectual property of Creative is distributed, [it] will have no problem with it."

[StevoJD]

They should've hired the guy instead.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

What's with all this Creative bashing? Their products are amazing and their [XP] drivers are great. I must say though, their Vista drivers aren't so good. But that's really not their fault. Hopefully they'll come up with a new series of soundcards built from the ground up for OpenAL. In the mean time, I'd like to see how far Daniel_K gets with his driver improvements.

[Gavin001]

wow the topic is crazy wit the amount of people sayin they will no longer buy there products..they really shot themselves in the foot wit that post! Personnally i think they hav make some great Mp3 players and i hav never had a problem wit them!

[kiwi89]

Yea I have those drivers happening with my audigy 4 - dont know if I will get another creative sound card again unless they can make some better drivers. If anyone wants the drivers PM me and Ill upload them somewhere - they are about 75mb for those interested.

[DELTETHISACCOUNT]

I'm extremely glad I decided to switch from Creative to HT Omega. Their products are BARGAINS compared to ANY Creative product and do so much more.

EDIT: I just made a post in the forum also. They lost another customer.

Edited March 30, 2008 by Ruiz

[O.G]

What's with all this Creative bashing? Their products are amazing and their [XP] drivers are great. I must say though, their Vista drivers aren't so good. But that's really not their fault. Hopefully they'll come up with a new series of soundcards built from the ground up for OpenAL. In the mean time, I'd like to see how far Daniel_K gets with his driver improvements.

Apparently you've completely missed the point. It IS Creatives fault. Its not the user, its not the users choice of operating system, and its not Microsofts. Creative purposely chose to leave certain feature available to XP users disabled in Vista and used the excuse that it was the operating system that did not support those features, therefore people would have to upgrade their hardware to regain those features. This was a blatent lie and no more than a marketing strategy by Creative. Daniel_k effectively proved that by enabling those features which obviously were supported under the Vista operating system. Creative tried to fob consumers off with a lame attemt at pacifying the masses with crippled drivers in the hopes that people would ditch their old hardware and spend yet more of their cash on say a shiney new XFI, some people did just that and almost immediately regretted that desicion because they were effectively put in the same situation with Creative deciding exactly how much of what they paid for they actualy would get to use. This was a big mistake on their part. They took their customer base for idiots and now its come back on an epic scale and bitten them in the ass. I'll plagerise an analogy already used from their forums. This is no different than Ford threatening your local mechanic for fixing your car, or requiring you to buy a new one when someone builds a new road. Creative stock is down 3.26%, and its going to get worse, and to be perfectly honest, it serves them right.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Apparently you've completely missed the point. It IS Creatives fault. Its not the user, its not the users choice of operating system, and its not Microsofts. Creative purposely chose to leave certain feature available to XP users disabled in Vista and used the excuse that it was the operating system that did not support those features, therefore people would have to upgrade their hardware to regain those features. This was a blatent lie and no more than a marketing strategy by Creative. Daniel_k effectively proved that by enabling those features which obviously were supported under the Vista operating system. Creative tried to fob consumers off with a lame attemt at pacifying the masses with crippled drivers in the hopes that people would ditch their old hardware and spend yet more of their cash on say a shiney new XFI, some people did just that and almost immediately regretted that desicion because they were effectively put in the same situation with Creative deciding exactly how much of what they paid for they actualy would get to use. This was a big mistake on their part. They took their customer base for idiots and now its come back on an epic scale and bitten them in the ass. I'll plagerise an analogy already used from their forums. This is no different than Ford threatening your local mechanic for fixing your car, or requiring you to buy a new one when someone builds a new road. Creative stock is down 3.26%, and its going to get worse, and to be perfectly honest, it serves them right.

I fear it's you who has missed the point. No one is at fault here. Microsoft, for some reason beyond me, decided to remove the hardware abstraction layer for DirectSound & DirectSound3D from Windows Vista and that crippled the majority of soundcards on the market. And coincidentally, the majority of soundcards on the market are Creative soundcards. Vista has full support for OpenAL and Creative's X-Fi soundcards supports that natively. You can find a list of OpenAL games here. The real loss with Creative soundcards and Vista is the lack of DirectSound3D and EAX support. Unfortunately, older games relied on that instead of OpenAL and running those games on Vista will result in poor audio quality and lack of sound virtualization.

Creative has made an attempt to bypass this problem by creating ALchemy. What ALchemy does is translate instructions from the DirectSound API to the OpenAL API. As far as I know it works quite well in Windows Vista. I currently use it for games like Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2. Unfortunately, it doesn't make games sound as good as it did in XP but it's better than nothing.

Now, with that in mind, it's safe to say that this API issue in Vista affects nearly all of Creative's soundcards which includes the X-Fi series. Deliberately hiding a proper solution to restore the missing features in Vista would be suicide for Creative, and that's exactly why they tried something to fix it. I doubt Creative lied to their customers to "force" them to buy their X-Fi series of soundcards simply because this problem affects close to all their soundcards. It wasn't a lie and it certainly wasn't a marketing strategy.

I assume Daniel_K somehow found a way around the issue and that's great. Apparently he found an answer that eluded Creative, else they would've released a magic fix to restore the lost DirectSound3D and EAX features that aren't available in Vista. Take a moment to think about it. Why would Creative hide something like this from their customers? If they did indeed hide this fix, which I believe they didn't, then they are making themselves lose valuable customers. I don't know much about business but doing something like that would be really bad for business.

[Denis W. Veteran]

^^ The whole DS and DS3D issue is well known. I can understand that.

BUT there is no excuse for:

• throwing in CMSS in their latest 'official' Audigy 2 driver and not bothering to include CMSS2/CMSS Stereo Surround which both sound far superior to CMSS - this daniel_k enabled
  
• not including an equalizer that CLEARLY worked with Vista and possibly XP: maybe it was included in their older drivers CD, I don't know
  
• having drivers that stutter like mad for the simplest of all tasks
  
• And on top of that CMSS just decided to quit working once and for all; driver reinstalls don't fix it
  

Just for the heck of it I decided to try out my motherboard's onboard audio chip. For me it's the first time trying onboard sound on one of my desktop computers since December 2003. All I can say is (Y) to Intel HD Audio. Takes advantage of the Vista sound DSPs - now I can have surround sound and actually hear instruments once muddled out before. Music plays fine without skipping, even while 3DMark2006 and Orthos is running. Only disadvantage is the bass is rather weak, and games will now bitch at me for not having EAX.

I'll see how this works out. There's always XP and my Audigy 2 card waiting for me.

[O.G]

This has nothing to do with HAL or OpenAL, as I said once and I say again, you completely missed the point of this entire argument and are only reitterating undisputed facts that have nothing to do with what people are complaining about. The drivers Creative have released for the Audigy/Audigy2/XFI series cards were released with features that were included in but DISABLED by Creative. This modder made reletively minor changes to enable these features which have been proven to be fully functional on Windows Vista, such as DVD-Audio support, DD/DTS decoding and enabling the THX Options as well as a host of other software that CREATIVE decided would not be functional in Vista. Now contrary to what you may believe, none of that has anything to do with any decisions Microsoft has made regarding the removal of the hardware abstraction layer for directsound becuase it is Creative themselves that wrote these options in at driver level. If stating that these features were unsupported, when in FACT they were supported but DISABLED, is not lieing, what exactly is it? Thanks for your input, but you have said nothing I do not already know, and have made no relevent point to the issue at hand. Creative have a very long history of using underhanded business tactics to further their market posistion (Aureal anyone? but to name 1), I suggest you do some googling before deciding that lieing to customers is beyond them. Also reading and understanding the open statement made to daniel_k by Creatives VP wouldnt go amis.

rm20010, the eq and THX setup was never included in either the driver cd included with the Audigy/Audigy2 retail products nor were they avalable for download from Creatives support downloads. This is quite odd considering the Audigy2 in particulalar sported a THX certified logo and was indeed a THX certified product. So why they chose to disable the THX setup software is beyond me. It is however enabled in the unofficial XP/Vista driver support cd released by daniel_k a couple of months ago and works in both XP and Vista. It seems that the software pakages that were updated look more like the Audigy4 with a rotary bezel volume rather than a slider and software selection as a pop up menu extention from the volume control rather than a bar widget thing. Also, thanks to these updated drivers, CMSS2 is functional in Vista they include the Creative Media Center (not originaly available) as well as the various EAX sound effects, which I never use anyway.

Edited March 30, 2008 by O.G

[Eric Veteran]

I can't edit my previous post, but according to Engadget he's being allowed to continue development "as long as no intellectual property of Creative is distributed, [it] will have no problem with it."

I don't know what Engadget's reporting as I don't read them. Here's a link to the Creative comment about it directly:

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/bo...id=30789#M30789

[Danrarbc]

I must say though, their Vista drivers aren't so good. But that's really not their fault. Hopefully they'll come up with a new series of soundcards built from the ground up for OpenAL.

The way I understand it Creative driver issues played somewhat of a role in the elimination of the hardware layer in the first place.

And they already have built cards for OpenAL.