Creative driver debacle rumbles on

What total idiots Creative really are, Daniel K could of been the best thing to happen to the company as regarding it's future which now looks very bleak. I certainly will not be buying another card by these jokers. Asus is the way to go, they outstrip Creative by miles.

I wish I had red this article before buying a second sound card from Creative. I had audigy 2 value on my windows xp pc, so when I bought my new windows 7 64 bit pc and I found out that i could not use it because my motherboard only has PCI Express slots I decided to buy a new card. I went to Amazon and bought the X-Fi Xtreme Audio, sure it works on my windows 7 but no more What-U_Hear feature. I bought it specifically because I wanted good sound and this feature because it enabled me to play my music on Paltalk chat rooms. This enabled me to pipe the muci directly into the chat room without any loss in quality. What a waste, now I own a sound card which is worthless to me.
Also the drivers on the install cd were not compatible with windows 7, so I had to go hunting for that and I still have no 'what u hear' and an imcomplete software application which is less functional than and inferior to the one I had with my old audigy card even thought I supposedly upgraded to a superior xi-fi card. What a joke! These people expect to stay in business? Not with my help! The least they could have done is tell me that not all features worked. Hell, support couldn't even tell me what product I could buy with the What-U-Hear option for a PCIE card. Shame on you Creative. Hope somebody buys you out and fires the morons responsible for running the company! No future sales to this consumer!

Nvidia, AMD and Intel all have their critics, we roar and scream bout Microsoft sometimes but most of us admit that we couldnt do without em. But Creative! Just about everybody hates them and who needs them anyway? I look forward to the day they go bust.

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?poipoi1&1

from way back.

I was a system builder back in 1999 and Creative's software for their cards would cause lockup in P3's with games. As a dealer I had direct support and found that their drivers causes all the issues. However they would not (company policy) not post the solution as it is company policy to never admit to a problem with their own product. You had to call them and get told to download the new driver for P3 processors, but they wouldn't post in on their site. That's when I quit selling their products. It's a management decision, drag the company to it's knees, but why?

Am I going to get flamed, or be the only person that has an x-fi extreme music in vista (32 bit) with 4gb of RAM, and not one single issue?

Compared to my onboard, I find the x-fi to sound much better with both music and games in terms of sound quality.

No driver issue's, no quality issue's, no crashes.

Yes, well aware of those cards thanks, and if you wanted decent reverb/positional audia A3D/Aureal was at one time a very the choice. (I should know I had one.) However, this was only true right up until Creative drove them to the wall through dubious law suits. (But that's a whole other gripe.)

The rest of the cards may well be adequate but lacked the support or else, to my knowledge, used the doomed A3D anyway. It's the whistles and bells like EAX/A3D that count at the top end (which is probably why Asus make such a song and dance about it), and since Creative had driven their only credible competitor out of business people have been stuffed for choice. 

Regarding you getting good performance and reliability out of a generic card, I don't doubt that for a second. As I mentioned earlier I don't even see much need for a stand alone card any more, generic or otherwise. Most users with a decent surround speaker system will be hard pushed to tell the difference and the supposed FPS benefits of sound acceleration are marginal at best IMO. Which is why I don't really recommend anyone bother with a card these days unless their on board audio is noticeably poor.

Anyway, as for why I have and X-Fi... it's got very little to do with marketing and a lot to do with review sties. (I doubt any reader of the Inq trusts any company's marketing spin.) Personally I rue the day I listened, as I wasn't going to bother but the card was cheap and the reports glowing:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2518&p=1
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/07/01/creative_x-fi_xtremegamer/1
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Soundblaster_XFi_XtremeMusic/?page=1
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/sbxfi/

etc. etc. 

If you want to blame anyone I'd start with the reviewers, they totally dropped the ball when it came to Creative products. I certainly didn't buy their card because I think the company can do no wrong, and I bet many others feel the same.

Gift.

My first dedicated sound card was the Gravis Ultra Sound Max. It brought the shotgun in Doom to life. Unfortunately Creative was well on their way to becoming "The Standard". Translated; the sheep will take what we give them and we don't care if they like it. All too familiar these days. One of the above comments above (probably from an "Intelectual property" holder) Two wrongs don't make a right. The only thing being stolen here is my money from Creative, and instead of taking my money and run they are just standing there laughing at us. I do not doubt they have the ability to fix the $300 sound card this sucker bought from them around the time Vista came out. $300 is a lot for a sound card and I do not mind paying for it but at least give us the option to purchase the software to let us utilize the $300 piece of landfill that was released shortly before Vista. M-Bahh

I've been looking for a new soundcard for the past couple of weeks already. I have no love for Creative or their bizarre drivers and software. Using WinXP ProSP2 and just trying to get the drivers/software on an XtremeGamer to work properly has been a nightmare. To the point where I now need a complete wipe and reinstall. Note this is right now a 2 month old computer. On my older computer, I tossed in an Audigy 4 cause my onboard sound was flaky. Did a Creative update? The updates now sees the A4 as a Live! card. Huh? And now that computer's running slower than slow.

Am now looking at Audiotrak, ESI and M-Audio. Basically anything that isn't Creative and hasn't been sullied by them and their bloated, non functioning correctly drivers/software. And guess what, the prices are very similar. What's missing? mostly it seems EAX - which IMHO is overhyped anyway and can be a PITA at times.

What Daniel_K did was something Creative should have been doing - supplying the customer with stable, up to date information and drivers. Asking for donations? no, that he shouldn't have done. That does smack of being paid for drivers, etc., though I read that he only ended up with something like $50 in donations - which he returned. 

But as to the legalities? Creative KNEW he was doing this, he didn't hide it, he was on their forum letting people know what he'd done, where they were and to go get them. So saying he "stole" from them, so they have a right to get uppity on that angle, umm, no. If they had a problem they should have said so from the beginning.

Maybe if Creative spent more time making their products work , putting drivers and software d/l on their site instead of what appears to be deliberately crippling them in an attempt to keep the consumer buying new hardware every time they turn around and not blaming the user, the O/S, the cycle of the moon, whatever, none of this would have happened. Basically, I feel that this has blown the lid off what are some shady business practices.

It makes you wonder exactly how little creative think of and appreciate their customers. I get the feeling that they don't care at all. At least as long as their shit is sold anyway. Since a couple of years though, I've been actively trying to get people to NOT buy or in any other way support this disgusting corporation. It makes me feel good everytime a get the opportunity.

How well is Terratec known outside Germany? I use their sound cards since several years, however I do not run games. Over here they have a good reputation, and reportedly they seem to offer a good service hotline as well.

They should have put this guy on their payroll instead. He apparently was able to do what their programming team couldn't. It looks like while they only have utter laziness to show on the Linux side of things, they have an extreme case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome on the Windows side. At the very least they should have treated him like AMD/ATI treats the Omega Drivers guy.

I could go into a ramble about Vista, Drivers an DRM. But I'm 99% sure it'd fall on deaf ears.

I'd just like to be a self righteous d*ck an point out:

Creative Surround System + Ubuntu = Faultless.

Each to their own I suppose, however there's only so much crap you can take from big companys that take your money an fail to deliver.

Down with Creative!

Check out boycottcreative.com 
Newegg has received 5,000 RMA requests in the last 48 hours for Creative sound cards that don't work in Vista, so they are PULLING Creative cards from their site! Way to go, Newegg!

Down with Creative!

Check out boycottcreative.com 
Newegg has received 5,000 RMA requests in the last 48 hours for Creative sound cards that don't work in Vista, so they are PULLING Creative cards from their site! Way to go, Newegg!

I can't really take part in the current festivities. Creative disappointed me years ago and left me in the cold with a product. Since then no Creative for me.

But boy, do I have fun seeing Creative getting a good beating in all the gamer forums, on all the hardware and gadged reviews sites and by the geeks at large. They deserve it.

Turtle Beach, Diamond, heck, even onboard sound - all that actually WORKS. Anyone remember the Live! & Via chipset bus noise interaction? Nothing's changed.

I bought the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude. It uses the X-Fi chipset but is made by a different manufacturer.

I thought they were going to build their own driver for it, but they just use rebranded and slightly modified Creative drivers. At least Auzentech tries to change what they can, but I still have problems with Soundfont support and blue screens when I change card modes.

Auzentech was stupid for discontinuing their high end C-Media 8778 card. I would buy one of those instead, but now I'm probably going to turn to M-Audio.

In addition, no one needs to use EAX anymore. FMOD EX provides all the features of EAX and appears cheaper to license. FMOD runs on any card, any OS, and uses low CPU.

Well, I've never had an actual problem with Creative on XP, as long as I don't install the assorted junk that comes along with it. Vista is s**t. The DRM subsystem of Vista has seriously f****d the audio and video subsytstems and as a producer of audio I wouldn't dream of touching it even with a twenty foot pole. It's on my laptop though, where it runs Office at mindbogginly slow speeds. Get with the program, install XP, Microsofts last known good configuration.

What happened to the Zen Vision M? i could understand it being discontinued if they replaced it with a relevant product, but they replaced it with the new Zen solid, state, half the capacity, twice the price, and reduced functionality!!!

What a bunch of morons!!!!

Oh, also, if you have Vista you Cannot reset a Zen vision M as their reset program is incompatible with media player 11!!! so you have to have an xp machine running mp10 or older

Creative's Bloatware they call software has stunk forever. X-fi drivers with a mic didn't really work in XP. 

So I haven't bought Creative sound cards in forever. For a long time I used Chaintech AV-710. Now I'm using bluegears b-Enspirer with the Cmedia Oxygen chip and its hands down the best card I've ever used. Oh yea it works great in stupid Vista. :)

On a related note: where the hell are updated Audigy 2 drivers to be found?

But what alternatives are there to creative? I used to recommend aureal-chipped products, but they went under a long time ago.

That's what happens when there's no competition. Creative can do whatever they want, because for us consumers there just isn't any other choice. If someone made a good soundcard (ideally for gaming), it would teach Creative a nice lesson.

There's now a petition demanding that Creative start releasing decent drivers and stop mislabeling products, stop harassing independent developers, and support open source driver development. http://www.petitiononline.com/crtvlabs/petition.html

.. Yes its me.. a die hard creative .. fan .. for speakers to sound cards.. 
you have lost me too.. 
for your terrible support..

I will never ever ever again recommend creative..

Does anybody remember how creative infra CD-Rom drives started failing ...............
this was i think in 1999 or 2000.. whatever.. there was huge lot of these faulty drives..

these drives would read cd's for you but garbage...


With the quality of on board sound built into almost all motherboards I don't understand how they keep going. I have a high end one of their cards from a couple years ago and don't use it because of their bloated drivers and quirks in them, no problems with my on board sound on my Gigabyte X38 platform.

I have the Emu 1820m sound card on an x64 (Opteron) system.
I have yet to load the drivers, but I'm hoping that they were written more for XP x64, though they may have been thinking that Vista (a narrow view) OS and XP x64 are similar. 
Many drivers have been released this way, though the Microsoft x64 updates are slanted more with W2K3, these days it would seem.
This whole driver thing with Creative is not new, they have never had strong driver update support. They release a new "Gee-wiz" product with drivers and thats that, until the next new better product.
Buy Buy Buy

It would be interesting to know if any non-english market is stronger and is supported better.

This is news? Creative products and drivers have bee abyssmal since at least the Sound Blaser LIVE! release. No other sound card company - ever - has had systemic hardware incompatibilities. Creative always has. No other sound card company has - ever - had systemic driver problems in the way that Creative always has.

People who are stupid have been buying Creative cards for the past many years, because of the specs of the hardware and their marketing prowess. They do so totally ignoring the obvious and eternal hardware and software problems that Creative has never cared about...and why should they when the sheep of this planet buy everything they put out anyway?

To those of you whining about problems with your Creative cards now - too bad. You're the idiots that have been encouraging Creative to behave this way for the past decade or so, and have no one to blame but yourselves. You're exactly like Apple consumers - doesn't matter how overpriced or screwed-up the product is, you just buy it because the ad says it's the best. Tards.

If you can't get something legitimately, does that justify your stealing it?

I gave up on Creative products years ago because of the poor state and continuous problems with their drivers, and nothing's changed.

Make your PC a Creative free zone, and watch your system stability improve dramatically.

...for consumers to find out how truly abysmal a company Creative is. I learned this lesson long ago on their modems, DVD drives and of course SB Live cards. Also had a friend who bought one of the first Muvos that didn't last longer than a year. They sell you a product and from that point they just don't care.

Get it straight people. This is not new. Creative has had YEARS to get it right but they continue as always. 

We just need other companies to steer away from licensing EAX(I'm looking at you Asus Xonar) so Creative can die sooner rather than later. Let another company create a sound standard for games.

Just one more customer lost... forever....

Wow, this is fast becoming story of the month^H^H^H^H^Hyear! 

Inqed, Slashdotted, Reddited, Dugg, Gizmodoed, [H]ardforumed....funny it's missing at the other plaice Ha!

I'd strongly suggest people with pre X-fi cards take a look at the Kx project drivers; it's great stuff.

Let’s see, intransigent company under delivering and overpromising to a massive group of consumers. What's needed here is a good old fashioned class action lawsuit. Anyone have access to a legal opinion?

Creative's Vista drivers were dire for ages, and they still lack the functionality of the XP drivers. I'm one of the many people who mailed the Inq regarding Creative since Vista hit the market.

My least favourite bug (which went unresolved for months) was the 4Gb blue screen. Creative didn't give a monkeys that their drivers brought the OS to it's knees and we were even treated to a rant and expletives from their driver developers (since removed but you can get the gist from this post <a href="http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=Vista&message.id=23909">here</a>.

Sure the abuse from irate customers prompted the outburst, but good companies don't usually flame back. Anyway, that was roughly where Creative lost me, I didn't appreciate being told I'd bought "a low end card" and therefore I'd get low to no support.

There was a time I'd not even consider building a PC without a dedicated sound card and that sound card would be from Creative. Now I'm not really so sure I'll even buy a sound card for my next build, let alone a Creative product. 

Gift.

They lost me as a customer when I found out that their Alchemy software was not free! Not only their Vista drivers did not deliver EAX as featured but I had to buy additional software if I wanted it. Well, it turned out my Audigy SE was not even supported by the Alchemy. So I had a completly useless 30$ piece of **** that could deliver the same quality and performance as my integrated 0$ audio under Vista.
Thank you Creative - for ripping me off. Off you go w/o another customer...

Wow, you'd think that Creative would kick its driver developers in gear after the debacle back in the SB Live! days. I switched to M-Audio's set of sound cards after hearing of their great sound quality and solid drivers. Now I have even less reason to look elsewhere, as they even have Vista drivers up and working. We'll soon see sorry companies like Creative go to the trash can of history, without many tears to be shed either.

Come on, this guy did a far better job on the drivers than Creative did. Why doesn't Creative just hire the guy? Not only would that solve the PR problem, but then the official drivers would improve as well.

If you download their financial statements (they're public and trade on the Singapore stock market?) you'll see that they've been losing money since 2005:

2005 = $1200M sales, $69M operating losses
2006 = $1100M sales, $145M losses
2007 = $914M sales, $61M losses

They did some kind of financial shenanigans so that only 2006 shows an overall loss for the year, but the trend seems clear ... DOWN.

Auzentech...

With all due respect to Giftmacher and others who feel that Creative has been "teh only choice," I am compelled to point out a long series of excellent sound cards from other companies. In no particular order:

C-Media 8738, 8768, 8770, 8778, 8788 (and cards using them, such as Sondigo Inferno, Audiotrak and Auzentech)
Aureal SQ2500 (and other cards of the era that used Aureal chps)
Philips "Edge" cards, like the Acoustic Edge
Via Envy-based cards, like Chaintech AV710
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, Montego, Riviera, etc.
Hercules Fortissimo I, II, and III

...etc. There has always been, and continues to be, many choices in sound cards. In each era of audio technology, non-Creative cards have been available with impressive quality - and lacking Creative's hardware incompatibilities and driver problems. I personally have never used a Creative card since the LIVE! - and as a small system builder, have not put a Creative card in any system I've built since then either. It would be wantonly irresponsible of me to do so.

Personally, I'm using a generic CMI 8768 card right now with a 5.1 Logitech THX speaker setup, and it's phenomenal. Both for music and gaming. I get no complaints from my customers regarding their sound quality for gaming or music from their non-Creative cards.

...I also get no complaints from hardware instability or driver problems. Which is a direct result of not cowing under to the marketing might of Creative.

"That's what happens when there's no competition." QFT.

This is exactly the problem, Creative have dominated the market for too long. Time was if you were building a high end gaming PC Creative were the only viable choice (NB Motoman, it's not like Apple because apple had/have competition).

Things are different now though Asus have entered the market and on board audio is getting better (i.e. a decent board won't crackle due to poor isolation from the other components thus sounding like crap). Plus, I think the new multicore processors diminish the FPS benefits you get from a dedicated audio card taking the load off of the CPU. Oh and of course the demise of directsound in favour of OpenAL seems to have levelled the playing field. In short, I think the need for a standalone sound card is diminishing, and it's going to bury Creative. If that does happen, I'll not be shedding a tear, they no longer bring anything special to the market, they won't be missed.

Gift.

What Creative Actually said:-

It's OK to make better drivers for Creative products.
It's not OK to make drivers for other products using Creative's code.
It's not OK to ask for donations for Creative's (altered by you) code.

Creative spread a hell of alot of bullshit about the real differences behind their sound cards. Lots of functionality is simply turned off at driver level. 

What this driver does is effectively the same as turning an old nv6600 into a nv9600 via a driver patch. 

Creative have been super polite to this Daniel K bloke considering how much of a risk his drivers are to their entire business plan (as much as I hate it). 

I had an early sb and was even dumb enough to shell out £150+ on one of the first awe32's in the country (duplex? midi? heap of junk, that deliverance feeling)
Creative trade on their name, unfortunately it's only after they've got your cash you find out their name is mud......



There's over 600 replies to that forum post now, and the main page has over 130,000 views! Creative may be legally in the right, but they just used a foot gun on themselves.

From moderator, you'd believe that? I'm Phil O'Shaughnessy, BUB & You better get spelling right or I'll Tort You. I Pity Fool Who Believes Some Real Asian Crap.
Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

Also the X-Fi on PCI-E is MIA, they release some half crippled low budget version.. but where are the other PCI-E, X-Fi products ??

The old PCI is beeing phased out and people have been more or less expecting PCI-E soundcards since late 2005..