Fuck Creative Labs, Fuck the Sound Blaster, and Fuck You if you buy one!
March 29th, 2008
For those just tuning in, Creative Inc, the company that sells the Sound Blaster brand of sound cards, has been giving a driver hacker a very hard time. The issue involves Vista driver support. I don’t know the full details, as I don’t own a Sound Blaster anymore, but the gist of it is that many features do not work in Vista, that used to work in XP due to architectural differences in the OS.
In other words, all those neat features they listed on the box, which people foolishly paid for, well those features do not work under Vista, Microsoft’s latest mainstream operating system.
Let’s think about that for a moment: it’s a sound card. It takes digital sound, converts it to analog and shoves it down a pair of wires to the speaker. Actually it doesn’t even drive the speakers, you still need amplifiers (which are built into most computer speakers). As far as add-on devices go, this is about as simple as it gets. Here’s an example of a basic home-made sound circuit that hooks up via USB.
Anyway, Daniel K is a smart fella who hacked the drivers in order to bring those missing features back in Vista, and he has shared his work online for others to enjoy. He’s basically giving away for free what should have been Creative’s responsibility from the beginning, giving Sound Blaster owners what they want and paid for, and he’s being punished and threatened by the company as a direct result of these actions.
If you want to find out more about this despicable company, hit up Google and read all about how they once tried to charge money for Audigy device drivers, or how they drop support for their products after 2-3 years only to re-release near-identical hardware for more money (see “X-Fi Xtreme Audio”).
I invite everyone to boycott these bastards. Today’s Sound Blasters have nothing in common with the products we all fell in love with 20 years ago.
Here’s the forum thread concerning Daniel K. Many people have signed up to the forum purely to leave angry comments, I invite you to take a few minutes to do the same. Tell this company exactly how much they suck. They will never change, but the more people post, the more attention this story will get and hopefully others will stop buying this overpriced garbage so we can all watch the company die!
April 4th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Arrete tes niaiseries pis fas moé d’autres tracks calisse!! Creative sucks - go pro - go Mac Pro!! love you xox
May 10th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I am now on a quest to screw and badmouth creative labs anywhere and everywhere I can. I think they SUCK for the HORRIBLE drivers in windows 2003, vista and for all the old cards.
The board and the president and CEO and VP of engineering and the CTO of creative labs should all have a leg removed as punishment for the horrible things they have done to the quality of the SB/Live/Audigy/XFI cards.