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Geek Culture / Creative shoot themselves in the foot?

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RalphY
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 05:25
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So since Vista came out Creative support for their sound-cards have been a bit pants. Many people have had problems with the Vista drivers, and they purposely limited features on older cards in the hopes that people would buy their newer models.

A while back a member of their forum Daniel_K, started modifying each release of the drivers to make them function better on Vista, and add back functionality to the older cards which was available in XP but Creative left out of the Vista drivers.

On Friday they posted on their forum requesting that Daniel_K stop working on the driver, and removed all links to it. They now have a 134+ page (and growing fast) thread, each post saying basically the same thing "you just lost a customer". Apparently newegg has cut the price of all creative sound-cards as well and will stop stocking them due to complaints from customers (not sure how true this is - sounds doubtful to me).

Personally I think this sucks. I have been using the modified version of the Audigy 2 driver as the official Vista one is rubbish. It doesn't have half the features it had on XP that made me buy it in the first place.

Linky to the original thread: http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=1.

Oh boy! Sleep! That's when I'm a Viking! | Super Nintendo Chalmers!
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Darth Vader
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 07:14
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That's real bad!
My bro's got one of those older cards, hope he got the patched before this! lol.


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Jimmy
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 07:20
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people still use sound cards?

"Oh hey, nice website Jimmy, it's really nice and fancy." -- That C++ Nerd
Visit. Website. NOW!
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Grandma
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Location: Norway, Guiding the New World Order
Posted: 31st Mar 2008 07:39 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 07:40
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Quote: "people still use sound cards?"


Lots of people do. People that work with audio recording and mixing (yours truly). People who are audiophiles. And people that just want *everything* on their new rig. Oh, and special people that don't think that they will get sound from their computer unless they buy a sound card (totally ignoring any built-in luxuries). And yes, they do exist.

This message was brought to you by Grandma industries.

Making yesterdays games, today!
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Agent Dink
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 07:43
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I got one of the new Creative cards a few months ago. I definitely noticed an increase in quality. It's great. I don't have Vista on this machine, but XP-wise it's easily the best sound experience I've ever had

MISoft Studios - Silver-Dawn

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BatVink
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 11:53
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Interesting, the guy who posted is Vice President of Communications. Sorry, was Vice President of Communications
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Digital Awakening
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 12:41
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You can sign This petition if you like.

[center]
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Seppuku Arts
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 13:05 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 13:06
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Woops, well they forget that part of their job is not only to make money, but to make customers happy and not to pee them off. As happy customers = money and more future prospects. People don't always want to upgrade their hardware immediately, or will when they purchase a new computer, reducing compatibility will only pee them off and not trust the company in the future.

Lets hope Creative learn their lesson...after all in my next computer I want a decent sound card that still works properly after a while, that's not a crappy on-board one and is cheap enough. (it's fun shooting things on a game without hearing the gunshots, but after a while it gets ridiculous)

"Experience never provides its judgments with true or strict universality; but only (through induction) with assumed and comparative universality." - Immanuel Kant
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MSon
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 13:18 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 13:20
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Just signed petition

905 Signatures Total

Come on guys, its a fully valid cause, it must at least beat 1000, when you sign the patition it will say in big bold text what the tally is so far

Are they doing the same with BuiltIn SoundCards?

Everyone Be Cool, You, Be Cool.
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CattleRustler
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 13:54 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 13:55
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the problem seems to stem from EAX vs OpenAL and Vista. This phenomenon of messed up drivers is not only affecting Creative and soundcards, but many devices from many manufacturers with regards to vista. We are at a strange period where we have almost too many OS's available that must be supported. This is not to say that creative isnt responsible too but all these problems in general mainly trickle down from Vista and companies trying to support multiple OS's. I just built a new pc but I stayed with xp pro 32 for exactly this reason - driver issues.

as for sound cards vs onboard as suggested by Jimmy, yeah there is a noticable quality difference when using a real card like an x-fi from creative, vs a supposedly top notch mobo-included sound. the one i had from asus was a pci-e 1x riser card which while seemed like it would do the job, ended up having driver corruption issues, and even minus that, the audio was crap compared to the x-fi. Also I get a framerate boost using x-fi in gamer mode (115fps vs 153fps) in the HL2:Loast Coast video stress test.

[href]mod2software[/href]
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RalphY
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 14:37
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It's not really lack of EAX though that's getting people angry here, it's the fact that Creative has intentionally crippled their older cards in an attempt to force people to upgrade.

From my understanding mostly all the modified drivers for Audigy cards did was re-enable features which Creative had disable from the X-Fi drivers. All these features are supported by the hardware, and worked on XP, Creative just decided to switch them off for Vista.

Now I don't mind having to upgrade my graphics-card every couple of years to stay up to date. But being forced to upgrade my soundcard, when my current one is perfectly capable of all the features of their newer model is ridiculous.

Oh boy! Sleep! That's when I'm a Viking! | Super Nintendo Chalmers!
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Digital Awakening
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 15:42
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The reason Creative stopped the 3rd party drivers was because they made it possible to use older sound cards in Vista, they had no problems with them activating features on the Vista supported cards.

[center]
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monotonic
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 17:35
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Now up to 1351 signatures.

Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.
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Jeff032
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 18:15 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 18:22
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over 223,000 views on that thread

backlash is so entertaining IMO

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GatorHex
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 18:22
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I can understand how people are annoyed. Vista seems to have screwed up a lot of USB driverless devices and Creative are in no mood to fix legacy products because it seems they see it as an opportunity to sell a new bacth of products (they are not alone).

I'm worried though that if they stop 3rd party driver support it holds up a big fashing sign saying "DO NOT SUPPORT ME ON LINUX!!!"

I have the XFi-Gamer sound card it's amazing for anything based on DirectSound, games and music production, as it takes any load away from the CPU as it's equivilent to a 3Ghz Pentium 4. Runs on Vista fine but I always upgrade to a new computer when a new OS comes out because we had the same issue with XP so i didn't expect any different. Worth £50 of anyones money even if you do hate Creative!

DinoHunter (still no nVidia compo voucher!), CPU/GPU Benchmark, DarkFish Encryption DLL, War MMOG (WIP), 3D Model Viewer
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KeithC
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 18:42
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Over 1400 signatures now.

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 19:24
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1626. I'm not affected, but banning people's fixes is just plain idiotic.


I fail at life. No, really.
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Aertic
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 19:40
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Wow, many people are signing away by the minute.

Quote: "Posted: 31st Mar 2008 10:42
Over 1400 signatures now."

Quote: "

Posted: 31st Mar 2008 11:24
1626. I'm not affected, but banning people's fixes is just plain idiotic."


Also this is idiotic, if I was the Ceo of creative I would do a better job than the one they ave now dont you think?
This is just crazy, utterly, amazingly stupid(That did not come out right.)
Wow.

-Nathan
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Data
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 23:18
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There are currently over 2100 signatures

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Aertic
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 23:18
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OMG!
How active are them forums?
I wonder?
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Jeff032
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 23:37 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 23:51
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Yay, new sig to join in on the fun (IBugUNot's idea)

[EDIT] Made it more colorful

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Aertic
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 23:39
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*hehe*
Lol, nice sig!
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Darth Vader
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Posted: 1st Apr 2008 07:39
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2659 total signatures.


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Aertic
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Posted: 1st Apr 2008 18:07
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Flippin heck!
That amazing.
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Darth Vader
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Posted: 2nd Apr 2008 07:26
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3011 total signatures.
Seems to be slowing down a little...


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Jeff032
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Posted: 2nd Apr 2008 07:34 Edited at: 3rd Apr 2008 16:06
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Just FYI, Creative finally did respond

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=121513

[EDIT] For some reason the link changed...fixed it now.

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GatorHex
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Posted: 2nd Apr 2008 10:43 Edited at: 2nd Apr 2008 10:44
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ppl powa! we should form a uninion

DinoHunter (still no nVidia compo voucher!), CPU/GPU Benchmark, DarkFish Encryption DLL, War MMOG (WIP), 3D Model Viewer
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RalphY
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Posted: 2nd Apr 2008 16:07
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Haha interesting to see the response isn't from the same guy that wrote the original message. Glad they came to their senses, although I wonder what they will have Daniel_K take out of his drivers.

Oh boy! Sleep! That's when I'm a Viking! | Super Nintendo Chalmers!
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GatorHex
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Posted: 2nd Apr 2008 16:09
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They'll probably ask him to stop taking money for his work I think.

DinoHunter (still no nVidia compo voucher!), CPU/GPU Benchmark, DarkFish Encryption DLL, War MMOG (WIP), 3D Model Viewer
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Digital Awakening
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 12:23
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Quote: "The message you are trying to access has been deleted. Please update your bookmarks."


That may have been by someone not part of Creative.

[center]
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MSon
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 12:28 Edited at: 3rd Apr 2008 12:35
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:-|THE APOLOGY HAS BEEN DELETED...But not to worry as The Petition is still active if anyone still wants to sign it

PS: 3493 Total Signatures on Petition so far?

Everyone Be Cool, You, Be Cool.
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Digital Awakening
AGK Developer
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 12:44 Edited at: 3rd Apr 2008 12:45
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Is this the one?

Quote: "We have read the strong feedback about Creative's forum post regarding driver development by Daniel_k and other outside parties. Creative's message posted on our behalf by our Company spokesperson tried to address our concern about the improper distribution of certain software which is the property of other companies. However, we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties. The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products. Outside developers have been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our Sound Blaster products, and we do support and appreciate these efforts. This however does not extend to the unauthorized distribution of other companies' property. We hope to work out a mutually agreeable method for working with Daniel_k in supporting his efforts in driver development. Going forward, we are committed to doing a better job of working more closely with third parties to support their development for our products and our customers."



I would suspect that cards that Creative does not support for Vista will have to be taken out of Daniel_k's drivers. Personally I don't see why he can't take donations for his work. He's not charging anything for the drivers, they are still free for anyone to download. They mention "other companies' property" and that may indicate that older cards may use something that Creative themselves do not own (like patents licensed from some other party).

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Michael P
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 13:03
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This won't be the end of creative but it sure will lose them some customers.

BT have done similar things as far as purposely making software buggy; on my BT Voyager 1010 wireless adapter, it is near impossible to uninstall the software/drivers. So much so that you have to ring up a 50p per minute customer support line and they will walk you through steps to uninstall since the standard uninstaller doesn't work! On a side note: BT are a terrible company, terrible terrible terrible (I hate them).
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MSon
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 14:35 Edited at: 3rd Apr 2008 14:39
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I work for BT, and on Broadband
My names also Michael, are you sure your not my evil twin?

Everyone Be Cool, You, Be Cool.
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monotonic
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 14:40 Edited at: 3rd Apr 2008 14:40
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Quote: "I work for BT"


*Goes to shed to select an appropriate weapon*


The only problem I've had with BT was my wireless router kept disconnecting from the interweb. Although I think that was probably a fault with the BT router I had. But, other than that I've had no problems with BT.

Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.
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Michael P
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 14:45 Edited at: 3rd Apr 2008 14:47
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Quote: "I work for BT,"

You are a sick person.

Quote: "and on Broadband"

Urgh.

BT used to screw around with my internet so much. e.g. they sent an engineer round to check why my internet wasn't working. He left after telling us that our phone and internet worked fine; when we checked, the phone & internet didn't work and he had left .

Quote: "are you sure your not my evil twin"

Seriously now, there is a possibility that we have met in real life a few years ago. My dad and you may possibly be friends. Have you ever known a person called 'Jonathon Pryor'. I remember some man my dad was friends with worked for BT, on broadband !

Oh and I should add, I think this man's name was Michael
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RalphY
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 16:05 Edited at: 3rd Apr 2008 16:06
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Quote: "This won't be the end of creative but it sure will lose them some customers."

Indeed, my Asus Xonar D2 arrived this morning, and is working much better than my Audigy 2 ever did. I was gonna upgrade to an X-Fi a while back but after this the Xonar won out.

Oh boy! Sleep! That's when I'm a Viking! | Super Nintendo Chalmers!
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5867Dude
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Posted: 3rd Apr 2008 18:00
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I just signed making it 3522 signitures! WOOT!!!


Was Cool Kid
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