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!
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.
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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!