Creative halts unauthorized distribution of homegrown Vista drivers
By Darren Murph 
posted Mar 29th 2008 4:52PM
posted Mar 29th 2008 4:52PM
Chances are that if you do your duties on Vista and rely on one of Creative's sound cards to get your dance on, you may have become frustrated by the firm's inability to offer up a driver package that lived up to those loosed for Windows XP. 'Course, if that rings a bell, you're probably not too concerned -- you know, thanks to those unofficial (but totally functional) drivers brought to you by Daniel_K. Unfortunately for users suddenly excited to gain some extra utility from their device, Creative has hopped on the offensive and is forbidding said compiler from distributing the firm's technology / IP (not to mention collecting donations), and it's also scouring the 'net to remove other links to the software. Granted, we fully understand Creative's desire to disallow the distribution of untested, potentially harmful third-party drivers, but until they release the drivers customers expect they should be a little more cautious about shutting down third party patches.[Via Slashdot, thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Update: It seems Creative has decided to allow Daniel_K to continue with one particular endeavor at least, noting that "as long as no intellectual property of Creative is distributed, [it] will have no problem with it." Thanks, Aaron!
why? It sounds like a typical Apple user/fanboy...cough, Engadget's editorial staff, cough...
I'm just waiting for some good Geforce 8000 series drivers. Wonder if someone else will pop those up on the Internet and Nvidia will whine just like Creative.
The beta 174.74 drivers (the most current ones right now) are amazing.
Thanks for mentioning those! I hadn't noticed that they had been released.
Pity. Creative do make some really nice products, but their inability to make decent Vista drivers will have me looking elsewhere for my next sound card purchase. I'm looking at you Asus :)
Creative Labs lost me when they decided that my SB Live 5.1 was 'outdated' and no longer deserving of drivers. Explain to me how a sound card ever becomes 'outdated'. I still have AWE32's from the mid 90s that work fine. But simply saying, 'no driver for you, pls upgrade 2 our fine line of new rehashed cards with higher #'s to make you think they are more win' is pretty pathetic. I now roll with whatever's built in to my motherboard and its more than sufficient... oh and actually has digital outputs that dont require funky little adapters or me to get the version with a $100 breakout box =)
@Hardy:
You card IS outdated. It may not have warranted an upgrade for the very next series of cards after yours, but as of now the X-Fi has revolutionized sound effects in games that use EAX.
Creative made good cards for XP. But they just seem dated on vista.
Perhaps if Creative put their resources into making decent Vista drivers, they wouldn't need to worry about unauthorized ones. Maybe they should hire this Daniel_K!
My Extigy worked perfectly under XP but barely works under Vista. Someone, maybe this guy, hacked a driver together for Vista but it unfortunately caused my laptop to bluescreen. That was the only bluescreen I've seen on Vista. I'm seriously considering a Turtle Beach card for my laptop now.
I was following the story on Slashdot, and some people were pointing out that the reson Creative is doing this is that these drivers enable a technology that exists on the cards, but Creative does not have the licenses to use (I think it was a Dolby tech).
Ehhh - can't blame Creative for not wasting time developing for Vista. They might as well put their efforts towards an OS that has gotten more positive reviews and has a brighter future like OS2 or Windows ME.
LOL
Yeah, it makes total sense to avoid supporting the latest version of the most widely used desktop OS in the world.
@ Torqueo
I think his post went right over your head...
XP is the most widely used destkop OS in the world.
He said the LATEST version of most widely used desktop OS in the world.
Try reading before posting.
When creative says something like this:
"Minimum System Requirements
Microsoft® Windows® Vista™ (Drivers available at us.creative.com) or XP (Service Pack 2, x64 or Media Center Edition)"
Customers are going to expect them to release good drivers for that product, anything less is not living up to their advertisement.
Actually, Windows 98SE is still the most used OS in the world. It's so sad.
Ignoring the blatant stupidity of trying to stop someone from using your product as it is meant to be used.
Trying to obliterate a small app/driver from the internet is impossible (see lame,dvddecriptor etc). Do they know how the internet works?
It's incredible how Creative is able to rob people blind with their expensive, yet consumer-grade sound cards. Poor Vista support just adds insult to injury.
I've been praying for years that Creative Labs would die they make nothing but horrible products and have done nothing but try to repress the computer audio industry by slapping down patent lawsuits, buying small upstarts to quash competition, and just be a horrible company in general.
My Creative ZEN MP3 player is nothing short of spectacular! I also like my Soundblaster Audigy 4 card, the cheapest ASIO solution i could find to run my Midi Controller.
Why not just give the guy a job?!
Or buy him out.
or kill him...
A job?
So he can become a zombie just like the rest of (sic) "Creative"?
A buy out?
So he can snort as much cocaine as possible within 24 hours?
Creative, meet HTC.
Their drivers are crap in XP, and even worse in Vista. It's amazing that one guy can do better than an entire company.
Stop buying overpriced consumer grade sound cards to "game" on your 20 dollar Dell speakers.
My Audigy 2 is the last Creative card I ever buy. I've put up with their shitty drivers and support for far too long, as most of the computer enthusiast community has.
Once I save up enough I'm going with one of the new ASUS cards.
God I love to hate Creative.
wow you really just brought that up? you must love to hate apple too!
wow thats a first my reply went ahead of someone elses, and he did it an hour before me.. anyway that was a reply to Dave not Jason
hundreds of people hate creative now
look at their forums
look at how they treat their customers on there as well lol
i was the biggest creative fan, ever since my soundblaster 16...
now im just laughing at them. they have the worst management ive ever seen in a company.
every time they make a decision, its the wrong one.
if you have an x-fi, the latest drivers off the site dont give you full functionality, you need to have your original cd lol
remember the sb live cards? i used the 3rd party kx drivers with that to make it amazing.
creative cripple their own hardware after a while, so you buy again.
never buy another creative product. i wont.
I can easily say as a big former creative fan, that they dropped the ball a LONG time ago. I've been using since sound blaster 1, and had to drop after having a creative zen for a year, which to my opinion was a great device with BAD software. creative needs to WAKE UP. today it's NOT ENOUGH to give good hardware, you also have to supply the BEST SOFTWARE YOU CAN. period. If anything, look at Apple... you need to HIRE THIS GUY. You need to buy his software, and let everyone know that in todays market you're an INNOVATIVE THINKER, and adapting entity. it's the ONLY long term strategy. Otherwise, you will fade into the oblivion of great computer companies that dropped the ball... come out with this bit of news on Engadget, Monday morning, announce that you are RELEASING these pirate drivers that HELP YOUR CUSTOMER BASE stay your customer base for free on your website, and that Daniel_K will from now on HELP YOU SERVE THEM BETTER.
The only drivers that don't give me BSODs in Vista...
Wow. what fucking assholes.
I won't be buying anything creative out of knowledge they lack support. vistas been around for what, close to a year now?
creative == douchebags.
I think there is something else behind this. I've been using the Creative 2ZS for notebooks for a while now. It is the best card you can have, does everything that it's supposed to do, and I can hardly imagine it would be possible that another card would do it better. Indeed, compared to their latest X-Fi for notebook, the 2ZS performs actually better with high-impedance headphones.
What Creative is trying to do is sell more hardware. If they would offer continued support for a card platform that is already very good (Audigy), nobody would buy the X-Fi.
I haven't had any problems with X-Fi drivers in XP or Vista. I'm probably just lucky, huh?
In either case, it looks like Engadget is censoring cogent reader
feedback. They pulled my last comment. A shame really, I could
understand removing offensive or argumentative postings... but there
was none of that in my last post.
Hammer and sickle anyone?
Creative has great support for vista... If you buy their newest Cards. They have known for years that they are reaching the point of diminishing returns on every new sound card design. How much better is the Latest X-fi card compared to an Audigy 1 or Live card, Especially to a normal user who does not have $500 digital speakers. All I want is decent signal to noise ratio and I always got that with all of their cards. They saw Vista as a way to force all of their current, loyal cutomers to upgrade to their latest junk. For years they had us convinced of the superiority of a stand alone soundcard as opposed to the "built in garbage" we get with most motherboards. I don't need an X-fi I dont want an X-fi. I have 10+ live and audigy cards that they now have deemed obsolete. Guess what I am using my onboard Soundcard.. and its not bad at all. I have digital outputs and even an optical out. Not too shabby. Creative leave the guy alone.. and get to work on either giving me drivers or some reason to want to buy you product.. If you don't, I'll remember you fondly like I do 3dfx..
Massive backlash
This is on EVERY social bookmarking site
If anyone remembers the earlier days of Creative..the AWE32 period and so on, they will recall just how *brilliant* there driver support and updates were back then.
Seriously good.
Which makes how they have been for the last 8 years or so all the more disappointing.
sorry Adrian, this wasn't meant to be a reply to your comment. Gah!
Currently I'm using Vista x64 with an X-fi xtreme gamer card and it works, but only with limited funtionality (ie: no 7.1) AND it only works this way after i restart my computer, never from cold boot. Which is strange, because according to the wonderful people in Creative's marketing department it should be 100% compatible with Vista, which is obviously untrue. Up until 2 months ago with the release of the new Alchemy drivers the card wouldn't work AT ALL with Vista. If anyone should be getting in shit right now it should be Creative because they're clearing lying to comsumers about what their products are capable of. Which is really a shame, because I've always liked creative's products. It's safe to say my x-fi was the last thing i'm ever going to buy from them.
Am I the only person out there who thinks pretty much all sound card drivers are just outright poor?
It's like a great portion of the suppliers just flat out don't try.
It's like that with everything on the PC, it'd seem, aside from the big, BIG names (except Creative) (Well, ATI's drivers aren't exactly that great either, but they could be a lot worse!)
This is a bit like the Gerald Ratner incident (for those that don't know he was the boss of a chain of Jewellers here in the UK. He apparently said in a meeting that he wouldn't buy the crap his company were selling.... within weeks he was out of a job and the company went bust).
Creative have really shot themselves in the foot with this one. Here we have one talented programmer who has succeeded where a Multi million Dollar company has failed (or rather given up because it wants you to purchase its newest bestest most fabulous soundcard it has ever produced *until next year) and what do they do - rather than hire him they send out a cease and desist letter.
Hey Creative - hire Daniel K and fire the asshat who advised you to send out the threatening letter to him.
Creative just deleted the, thread from there forum. I got to the 2nd to last page of people saying they were throwing out there creative cards and would never buy another and then I clicked to the last page it has been deleted. The entire thread is gone.
This is BS - and I will never buy another creative product.
Creative didn't delete the thread, the mod just "moved" it to another thread, which killed the URL. Was it really a move to the right forum or just a way to cut down on publicity?
yea, they sucsmyballs, too!
Just one thing - what's a sound card?
one man did what the development _department_ from creative cannot accomplish. shame on you creative. i guess we all know what you think about customer relations.
Unbelievable. I own an Audigy card, and just recently had to deal with this crap to upgrade to Vista SP1. Here's the text of a message I posted on the forum:
I've been a long time Creative user, and I'm afraid that you've lost me with this one. I have used Soundblaster cards since the 8-bit Soundblaster Pro. Since then I've owned the Soundblaster 16, AWE 32, and a couple cards in the Audigy series. For over 15 years, I've used Creative's cards almost exclusively (aside from a brief stint with the Pro Audio Spectrum 16).
When Vista SP1 was released last week, I didn't see it in Windows Update because the latest driver available for my Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro was not compatible with the update. This driver hasn't been updated since March 2007, and didn't work all that well to boot. Analog 5.1 surround was sketchy, and the sub channel didn't even work.
Daniel_K came to the rescue in my situation. I needed to uninstall my drivers to upgrade to SP1, then install his driver package get my card working again. The installation went very smoothly, and my card is working better than it ever has on Vista. There are some quirks, but all surround channels are working as they should, and sound quality seems to be improved over the previous drivers (although this could easily be attributed to the placebo effect).
The last thing that you should be doing is going after Daniel_K. If anything, you should hire the guy to teach their driver team a thing or two.
Sadly, this is not likely a technical issue, but a marketing one. You seem to have made a deliberate decision to leave Audigy users in the cold in an effort to get us to upgrade to your new X-Fi series. Problem is, it doesn't seem to be working. You know full well that your forum here has post after post lamenting your substandard driver support with promises to avoid your cards in the future.
Your strategy may work with casual customers with a sub-$50 card, but not for others who have invested over $200 for a high-end Audigy card with a breakout box. Those people, like me, are still looking for return on their investment, and will be the first to walk away from you when they get snubbed.
Hopefully this is a misunderstanding, and you will work out a deal with Daniel_K. If this doesn't happen, you stand to lose some of your most loyal customers. Given your track record so far, the outlook doesn't look good.
Please. Step up and do the right thing here. Support your customers, and the rest will follow.
I will not put up up with Creative's BS anymore. My mb's onboard audio will be good enough until I find something better. Shame to, I just installed a triple boot system and got all 3 OSs working with my Audigy/Audacity 2 ZS.
Hackers embed flashing animations on epilepsy support forum
Weird..people still buy Creative crap?
Why? If you want good sound for gaming, it really barely beats onboard, and if you are into recording or any other prosumer application why not buy a decent solution read: M-Audio.
Daniel_K doesn't develop the drivers. All he does is rebuild the setup from X-Fi and tweak some stuff to make it work under those cards. I don't believe he could build the drivers without having documentation.
There's now a petition demanding that Creative start releasing decent drivers, stop harassing people who pick up their slack, and support open source development.
See it at http://www.petitiononline.com/crtvlabs/petition.html
You would have thought the intelligent thing for Creative to do would be to offer this guy a job. He's obviously very good and hardware stuff and by employing him, getting him on the payroll and access to the hardware docs he could write decent drivers. It would cover two things, they get excellent Vista driver support for Creative at very little cost and the users get decent Vista drivers for the users so they wouldn't have to resort to 3rd parties for drivers. MS would love it too as the stats about Vista crashes related to drivers they released were interesting!
Wait, they STILL don't have proper Vista drivers? That's atrocious. Good to know, my search for a new MP3 player just got shorter.
SOUNDCARD CHOICES - ASUS , M-AUDIO AND TURTLE BEACH.
Oh, yeah... Because Creative's tech support is just THE BEST EVAR.
Not.
I stopped using Creative products because I was sent through the worst tech-support HELL ever with them. They suck at supporting their own products, and gods help you if you want support for an older product (like last years' version) because they act like you're some sort of luddite for not owning the newest, most expensive product they sell.
I will NEVER, EVER buy another Creative product until they stop outsourcing their tech support and start offering customer service that doesn't assume the customer's at fault. ---And this is from a guy who owned the top-of-the-line packages for music professionals. I wouldn't trust their janky products and their half-assed tech support as far as I could throw `em.
Well why is Creative doing this?
I am a Vista user who has an Audigy sound card and I am one of these people who uses his drivers.
These drivers are FAR BETTER than Creative. Almost fully functional as they were in the XP, excellent sound quality, and it has no bugs (that Creative's official(!) drivers have).
Well if Creative cannot make drivers for Vista, at least they can allow someone to distribute seamlessly working, better-than-Creative's-own drivers.
can some1 email me the drivers or upload them somewhere
If it wasn't for the drivers that this guy modified, there's no way I'd be running Vista right now.
Getting fully functional S/PDIF and 5.1 surround out of my Audigy 2 ZS Platinum (not a current card, but by no means a rusted out poopbox) was one of the major stumbling blocks I had in my earlier Vista endeavors, since Beta 1.
Between that, more or less stable 8800 drivers, SP1, 8 gigs of RAM, and VMware, my vista performance is good enough that it's been my primary OS for about 2 months.
Take away this dude's drivers and it all collapses like a house of soggy cards.
Fact is their cards have ALWAYS been finikey with how the PCI bus was addressed (IE: the "crackling issue") on many chipsets in the past, and always blamed motherboard manufacturers and chipset developers for their problems.
Funny thing is, they were the ONLY soundcard manufacturer with these issues... one would think many other hardware developers would also be having these problems but for some strange reason Creative's products were the only ones.
Now it's the drivers themselves which are causing problems - due to the fact that they are non-existant.
I lost most of my respect for Creative's driver development team by Vista RC2, and the remainder of it when I checked to see if any new drivers had been released for Vista which would work on my Audigy 2 ZS 6 months ago.
Now I have my onboard Realtek HD "soundcard" and everything works great in Vista - about the ONLY reason I would even think of using my Audigy2 would be for using Creative's failed proprietary "Digital output" system which my old Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 speakers work best with. Frankly I'll keep my working soundcard+drivers and upgrade the speakers.
Creative sucks, and now that Newegg is supporting its customers by removing Creative sound cards from its site that don't work in Vista, Creative is going to feel it in the WALLET, where it really counts.
I can't wait to read about Creative going out of business. Their customer and driver support are bottom of the barrel.
What's with Vista that drivers haven't been perfected yet for so much hardware? Is it something about the OS? or is the hardware people not believing in the OS?
Privately owned and free to use website maybe? They can do whatever they want and however they see fit whether you like it or not. When you run your own website you'll probably do the same.
Why do you people buy Creative products? I can't for the life of me understand that. Their products offer nothing more than hype over pretty much any standard 7.1 channel card. Their positional audio tech is not that great is just a rehash of older tech only hyped up.
Not really. You just go and buy a decent $30 soundcard from Realtek or whoever and nothing will collapse.
Yes, all this X-fi stuff is pure hype. There haven't been any real advances in sound cards. The truth is that the D/A converters they use are pretty standard and very cheaply available and hence found in even $30 soundcards. As for their positional audio technology, there really haven't been any improvements for a long while. Onboard sound is really everything you need. If you are an audiophile, then get a real M-audio quality external product and you'll be set.
Its not that Creative CANT do the divers, its that they intentionaly disabled dome of the cards features in windows Vista. Guess what, they are fixing to release the X-Fi 2 soon, with FULL Vista support, like the original X-Fi DID a while back. WOW, Whos betting on the fact that this is a Regular X-Fi card with new drivers! They have crossed the line and Daniel brought it to the public eye, WAY TO GO! ALL he did was renable the features, he didn't actualy change anything. Oh, one more thing, the X-Fi is a prettier version of the Audigy, and the Audigy is a little better version of the Live! The cards are basicly the same with different drivers to run them. Remember the EMU chip on the Live!, this was "The last sound card you will ever have to buy" according to creative, and it was, we are just buying newer flashed versions of it.
Creative is killing themselves, people are taking their cards and trashing them and going with better cards rather than staying with creative like they would have if it wasn't for this.
My X-Fi box states that it works with vista and has built in Dolby Decoding, but creatives drivers dont let it work. Is this a good lawsuit? I see it coming, and I might just start it!