Creative Goes After Driver Modder

FreedomFighter writes "Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being 'Vista Ready'. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."

Not a big surprise

[rastoboy29 (807168)]

Creative doing something dumb is a shock?  They haven't done anything intelligent in nearly decade.

Used to be I would buy ONLY Creative sound hardware.  Now I've given up after even a USB sound box of theirs didn't work, but the $15 Taiwanese ugly grey box worked fabulously with no effort, and on Linux, too.

Now they not only refuse to release decent drivers, but actively annoy those who do.  What, exactly, is the value proposition here for me as a customer?

Re:Not a big surprise

[edgrale (216858)]

I don't usually post but here goes:

Posted by JohnZS [creative.com] 2) I firmly believe that Daniel K has caught the flack because of the Dolby Digital feature As far as I am aware Auzentech paid a lot of money for an exclusive licence with Dolby to have their cards support this.

But but... didn't Creative have this feature on their cards? I could swear they did, at least in Windows XP.

E-mu/Ensoniq -- anyone?

[Angstroem (692547)]

Creative doing something dumb is a shock? They haven't done anything intelligent in nearly decade.

Indeed. Instead, they bought two of the finest synthesizer and sampler vendors and sent them down the drain.

This, Creative, I will never forget. And for this simple reason you won't sell anything to me. Never.

Yes, even if you shipped it with Linux drivers...

Re:Scruffy seconds.

[Rod Beauvex (832040)]

Creative turning to shit seems to correlate with the disappearence of it's competition.

Not really

[anss123 (985305)]

The original SoundBlaster was basically a copy of the Adlib (a soundcard by a small American company) with digital output tacked on. Problem was the implementation was so broken it was impossible to play back audio without crackles and pops.

The Soundblaster pro was better, but that's not saying a lot. The fact that the follow up - the Sound Blaster 16 - was NOT Sound Blaster Pro compatible is a clear indication how murky the SB Pro's underpinnings actually were.

Speaking about the SoundBlaster 16. Despite what you may believe the SB16 is NOT a 16-Bit soundcard. It can indeed play back 16-Bit samples, but the drivers simply down converts them to 12-bits.

The AWE was better but it was basically what the SB16 should have been and the competition by this time made the AWE look silly - and that is not mentioning the rather dishonest 64 simultaneous channels claim their marketing department threw about.

Creative's first attempt at a PCI soundcard turned out so murky that 1997 era mobos have something called a "SoundBlaster link" to make them happy. Finally giving up Creative bought another company that had made a PCI soundcard and slapped the SoundBlaster brand on it. (SoundBlaster 16 PCI .. or SoundBlaster 512, they had many names for it).

The SoundBlaster Live! was not PCI 2.1 complainant. If you somehow didn't know that you had to turn off PCI delayed transactions in the BIOS you would get blue screens every now and then. It also caused disk corruption on Via chipsets. Fun fun fun.

Since then the Live has been rebranded several times. They even spewed out a SoundBlaster Live 24-Bit that did the old SoundBlaster 16-Bit down sampling trick. How nice of them.

The SoundBlaster X-Fi is much nicer than the Live and the Soundcard I'm currently listening to. But beware, Creative is up to their old tricks even here. They talk a lot about their 24-Bit Crysalizer - for instance - but it is actually a 24-Bit Compressor similar to the 16-Bit compressors used by CD mastering studios. Like any audiophile can tell you a compressor helps cheepo speakers by making the sound a little more vivid and louder, at the cost of less fidelity on high end equipment.

Also note that the SoundBlaster X-Fi PCIe Xtreme Audio is not an X-Fi but a good 'ol SoundBlaster Live! in new clothes!

Re:Not really

[anss123 (985305)]

You're right. For Linux the audigy is better than the X-Fi, but whenever they get working drivers the X-Fi is the better card. One nice feature of the X-Fi is an option bitmaching similar to Via Envy cards. That bypasses the need for resampling altogether, though the resample engine in the X-Fi is very good.

*golf clap*

[by Anonymous Coward]

Well done Creative. You've universally upset users, upset developers and made yourself look like petulant asshats. Did you get your panties in a bunch because a lone hacker with a binary patcher could produce better drivers than your clearly mediocre driver developers?

Well your drivers always sucked and your hardware business is being steadily eaten by rapidly improving onboard audio and much better high end audio cards. You are not long for this world.

Stupid policy rather than weak developers, I guess

[Lonewolf666 (259450)]

After reading the thread on the Creative forum, I guess that "Daniel_K" re-enabled features for Vista rather than developing them from the ground up. Which leads us to the question why the Vista drivers were shipped in that crippled state. Between the lines of Phil O'Shaughnessy's message I read that it was a "business decision" rather than developer incompetence.

It is not the first strange decision by Creative either:
While I'm happy with the hardware of the Soundblaster Live! 5.1 I bought a few years ago, even then Creative offered only driver updates for download, where others were more customer-friendly and offered complete drivers. Which is quite helpful if you have mislaid your driver CD-ROM ;-)

So I agree that their management is a bunch of asshats. I also agree that onboard audio is getting better. My reason for buying that Soundblaster Live! was abysmal onboard sound on the Abit IC-7 mainboard of the computer. The new rig I built last year has quite acceptable onboard sound, and unless I see a really attractive sound card offer this one will just stick to the onboard sound chip.

So post the instructions or a diff

[00_NOP (559413)]

Modifying your own driver for compatibility reasons is perfectly legal in most jurisdictions, though distributing the modified driver may not be.

And surely a diff is not a derived work in itself - is it?

Bash.org reflects my feelings about Creative

[beacher (82033)]

Shamelessly stolen from bash.org [bash.org]

<booradley> I'd like to perform a one act play I call, "Creative screwed me like a bitch"
<booradley> <audigy> Buy me! I'm ever so sexy
<booradley> <boo> ok. come home with me and we'll play among the stars
<booradley> <audigy> tee hee! I love you, boo!
<booradley> <boo> I love you too, audigy
<booradley> :: later ::
<booradley> <boo> there, you're all installed. how do you feel?
<neshura> down in front!
<booradley> <audigy> LET JESUS FUCK YOU! VRAAAGH!
* audience gasps.
<booradley> * audigy is putting noise across your PCI channels
<booradley> <hard drive> Mein leben!
<booradley> * hard drive has died
<booradley> <audigy> Blaaah! blaaaugh! your mother sucks cocks in hell! graaagh!
<booradley> <modem> aaieee
<booradley> *modem has died
<booradley> and the new modem I got connects at 32k tops
<Shendal> By far, that's the best one-act IRC play I've read this season. Do I smell a Tony award?

Third-party problem

[Bananenrepublik (49759)]

From how I read the post, Creative licensed code from third parties only for XP, not Vista. Since this code is needed to use certain functionality, this functionality is disabled on Vista. In other words, Creative's bad negotiating comes to bite their customers in the ass. How could they be this stupid -- "oh, we only licensed this stuff for Windows XP? Too bad, let the customers suck it up"

Re:Third-party problem

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

Its more likely that the XP drivers use the raw unprotected path and the media overlords cannot disable it in the same way they can everything else.
God forbit that music might be heard without jumping through DRM hoops.

petulant and/or puerile

[apodyopsis (1048476)]

hmm.

that really does seem a little petulant and/or puerile.

a more enlightented company might of examined what he did to see why it worked.

a more customer focused company might of actually listened to their customer complaints in the first place.

and a company with a serious long term investments in this technology might of actually installed some QA systems and ensured the drivers were fit for purpose in the first place.

there seems to be no effort, willing or investment from Creative at this point.

and, wheras there is some truth to Creative protecting their IP, and beign disgruntled about anybody else possibly releasing unsupported patched, I believe Daniel_K summed it up quite eloquently on his response. "The funny thing is that you are faster "protecting" your technologies and intellectual properties than providing improved drivers and softwares for your customers."

Re:petulant and/or puerile

[by Anonymous Coward]

You might of [sic] tried to learn how to conjugate verbs in English [wikipedia.org].

Meh...Duh...and everything else

[atari2600 (545988)]

From the useless forum thread, it looks like one cowboy decided to make things easy for users suffering from Creative's ineptitude. As noble as his motives are, his methods weren't exactly legal. Looks like he was redistributing altered binary packages and asking for donations for his effort and time. I understand he was trying to help users but again his methods (and not his motives) are suspect. If Creative had any brains, they would probably hire the guy (daniel_k) as a contractor, get his contributions in, pay him a few Euro (or Yen or anything but the US$) and check that stuff into their CVS and call it their own.

This is what happens when non-technical management + legal team + marketing get together to make decisions (and it's not just Creative...). I've been using a Creative Soundblaster 5.1 Live for the last 7 years - the card cost me 25$ and I've spent over 2000$ in AGP / PCI-Express cards in the same time. I am not much of an audiophile and the card just plain bloody works. Creative makes great hardware - the whining on that forum was driver support for Microsoft Vista but that's another nightmare story...

Re:Meh...Duh...and everything else

[Fweeky (41046)]

Creative makes great hardware

They make popular, passable hardware which everyone QA's with because, oh, they're popular. This probably insulates you when they violate the PCI spec and fit things together with spit and duct tape.

simultaneous translation

[papabob (1211684)]

We, at Creative, are unable to mass produce chips that differentiates themselves by its design as we used to do. A few years ago we throw all of our money making a single chip design and our bussines since then has been to ship it with a simple eeprom saying what version of our card had you bought, and enable/disable features only at driver level. So please please please stop hacking our drivers to allow the advanced functionalities work in the low level cards, because in that way nobody will buy our multihundred bucks cards.

Sincerely yours.

What he needs to do is release the patcher...

[Yer Mum (570034)]

... as an idiot-proof installer and let users download the drivers themselves, like the patcher which generates the ATI Mobility Radeon drivers from the normal ATI Radeon drivers (see here) [driverheaven.net]. This would probably be legal in most country with the inevitable exception of the US, but even then their complaint would be weaker as he's not distributing their IP.

Actions speak louder than words

[kaos07 (1113443)]

The forum thread is interesting because it's full of irate users lambasting Creative for their drivers and their attitude towards "Daniel_K". However, how many of them are that upset that they will stop purchasing Creative products? We can bitch and moan all we like but if we/they/people continue to buy Creative's products regardless of how rubbish they are, regardless of buggy, feature crippled drivers and regardless of their attitudes towards their customers, they're going to think they have the prerogative to continue in this fashion.

I, for one, bought an X-Fi sound card. Buggy drivers and constant issues regarding gaming made me put it away. Reading that this was a common issue across the board made me decide not to buy Creative again. There ARE alternatives out there. Cheaper, better quality alternatives. Just for example, I replaced my X-Fi with an HT Omega Claro. http://www.htomega.com/index.html [htomega.com]

Creative Sucks

[Manip (656104)]

I'm never buying Creative again after how poor their drivers on Vista have been. The Creative 5.1 drivers have a huge memory overflow in them which causes the Windows Audio Service to need to be restarted every few hours or you'll suffer though huge amounts of audio distortion...

So I upgraded to their latest card in the hopes that their latest drivers might fix things. I picked out a X-Fi Audio Extreme, and this is only recently mind you...

And although the memory leak seems to have gone this card has the highly entertaining bug of turning down the master volume by 75% each time any input is received on the microphone, in use or others. A wonderful feature you can't turn off. So if I type too loud on the keyboard my music turns down by 75%...

Long story short... I gently unscrewed my Creative X-Fi and throw it against a wall. Then I plugged in to my Gigabyte motherboard's built in audio, enabled it in the bios, and haven't had any audio issues at all for coming up to two months now.

I'm not using Creative again. I'm done. Seven years a happy customer, now gone.

Re:Creative Sucks

[cortana (588495)]

Jesus Christ... and people say Windows is ready for the desktop!

Just remember

[DigitalisAkujin (846133)]

Just remember Creative, the geeks control the network.

We are the ones that fix computers for friends and relatives. Slashdot readers alone probably account for a good sizable chunk of all your sales ever so what do you think will happen when we stop recommending your brand to the people who don't know any better. Or better yet, say it sucks?

Your company won't be the first to die in the flames of a hoard of angry geeks and you certainly won't be the last.

not ineptitude?

[apodyopsis (1048476)]

after re-reading the entire thread for my amusement, I think this is not a simple case of ineptitude from Creative.

after all they have the original source code and we have to assume some partway competant SW engineers.

it seems that some of what Daniel K did was reactivate some features that had been intentionally crippled from older cards.

this seems more to be nefarious decisions on backwards compatibilty and forward roadmap taken on profit grounds not technical grounds. after all, we of the /. community are more aware then others that there is no compelling reason at all why HW from XP should not work on Vista - but there might be commerical reasons why.

follow the logic here. a brand new and shiny OS hits the market and you need to release drivers for it. would it not be tempting to cripple some of the older cards and hence try and tease people to upgrade to the latest HW? even better you could hold back some of the features of the later versions and try to gain additional income for them in the form of top range drivers. its an insane tactic but one that is used in the field quite alot.

the bad thing is that somebody then dissassemles that code for the driver realises what has happened and then patches the removed functionality back in.

this tactic is very prevalent in the industry - by attempting to artificially shorten the product life cycle you try to force repeat purchace and then profit. when there are no more additional features you can dream up then you attempt to deprecate the original in order to force purchase of the new. Creatice make no money at all from people using old sound blaster tech on vista so they will do everything they can to halt it.

maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I see this sort of thing all the time and it make a more logical explanation to me then "large multinational cannot write new drivers even when they have the source code".

comments?

Hardly unique

[Mike1024 (184871)]

Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers.

It's worth noting that Creative is hardly the only company that deletes posts they don't like in their corporate forums [google.co.uk].

(CREAF.PK)

[by Anonymous Coward]

The PK means the stock is traded off the pink sheets. Companies wind up there, and not on a legitimate exchange like the NASDAQ, because no CPA will sign off on their financial statement.

Must be a real open company.