Wow it amazing how this topic grown so big in only 3 days! Each reload I do there’s like a page or two more! At the time I’m writing those lines, there are 205 of them so far. I’m even amazed that registrations are still open on this forum. Thinking that Creative deleted lots of posts, it really amazed me that new poster can tell “freely” (as long they don’t get deleted) what they think. This said, be aware that if my post get deleted I will repost it until I get banned. If this occurs, I will register again and repost it until Creative gets tired. I actually encourage everyone to do the same, if such things should happen. It’s important ours opinions be heard!
First off, I want to say how much disappointed I am of Creative attitude toward Daniel_K. The guy is helping the community on a people helping people forum and is asked to stop because he’s helping too much… See the contradiction here? He restored missing feature originally available and isn’t even thanks for it. Instead he’s asking to stop because it goes against business plan… This kind of attitude should be illegal. Also the donation thing isn’t such a big deal. It’s a common practice in the driver modding community. The only company complaining is Creative. ATI and nVidia never complained on such things, they even used modded code from time to time. I mean… come on. Give the guy a job, he deserves it.
The product you sold were promoted with feature. Features now removed supposedly because of Windows Vista new audio architecture. Don’t hide behind false excuses, they have been proved wrong by Daniel_K. How can this even be legal? It not what was advertised. If you don’t want to do Vista driver, fine don’t do them. You are intentionally crippling good product to sell newer one, but still they aren’t working as advertised. It has been a year since Vista has been released now and as far as I’m concerned not much improvement has been done yet. But wait, here’s the best part: when Vista was first released, from what I remember no final drivers were available at all! How is it possible that I, a simple IT guy, was able to get myself a legal beta copy from Microsoft months before final release, when an entity like Creative, who probably work somewhat close to Microsoft don’t even seemed to have test their product on it? It was a well known fact that Vista audio would be different and thus drivers would have to be rewritten. How come nothing good was available on Vista release? Another thing that bugs me: What the hell is the idea with ALchemy!!! Why don’t you do a driver with a built in wrapper that listens for DirectSound pack and convert them to OpenAL on the fly. It would be much more effective and would give you the ability to know which games do not work instead of trying to find the ones working. Don’t tell me it’s impossible, ASUS do more than that in their current Xonar drivers. They actually emulate EAX effect on the fly. It does take more resources, but it’s really effective. If you would convert on the fly DirectSound request to OpenAL by a Windows service or by a built in wrapper in the driver, you would still take less resources than ASUS solution but with hardware support. Anyway with Vista’s new sound architecture, it’s kind of thought to take more resources; the counterpart is that buggy driver like yours should not affect system stability anymore.
I myself have been a long time Creative product user, but that time is over. I mean you guys make incredible audio chip, the best on the market, as far as I’m concerned. The only problem is that you terribly suck at writing drivers. I’ve been waiting over a year to get usable, non buggy drivers, but after a year, the fact is I’m still waiting. It did some good though. Other solutions are finally appearing, concurrence is developing at customers benefit. No more we’ll we have to use your product for gaming. ASUS new Xonar DX, per exemple, is a serious X-FI killer. It might only be software EAX like you pointed; more specifically an emulation of EAX, but it works. So yeah, effects won’t be exactly the same, but it’s a lot simpler and effective than ALchemy. It does take more resources off the CPU thought, but that’s pretty much how Microsoft planned sound management in Vista anyway. At the end it’s still better than sticking with your actual solutions and support. Your only interesting solution now would be X-FI MB, but it will still be to the detriment of your actual product line. In the end I hope all this will helps develop the industry.
Good bye Creative, it has been nice while it last but now it’s time for new player.
