While they are certainly within their right to prevent user's like Daniel-K from distributing modded/hacked drivers, it is obvious that Creative is betting (or hasn't considered) it's losses due to licensing/IP issues would be more than the loss of good will/faith with their customers.

As has been seen in other industries, opening up your platform to the user-developer community typically fosters great groundswell support for products and creates whole communities of fans. Typically this leads to greater sales, not less.

Creative needs to watch out. Not everyone cares about X-Fi processing or EAX enough to not abandon them for a more user-friendly sound-card company.

All he has to do is instead of releasing it as a complete package, release it as a bootable file patcher that only changes the different bits.

Then, the source code is 100% his and the users need to have the original to use it.

Problem solved.

Before people jump to conclusions. Daniel K did not pop out of nowhere, post the drivers and started to asking for money. Rather, Daniel K, an independent modder of Creative Labs drivers, voluntarily developed the driver openly on Creative's forum for over 6 months now, which is 3 official Creative driver releases.

He never asked for donations, made the driver downloads widely available and free, assisted in troubleshooting any problems that user came up with. Creative reasoning to stop him was because the user had a donation link at the bottom of his post, which he never ever ask for money.

As you may know, Creative suffers alot due to changes made by Microsoft and Vista. Basically making them rebuild all their drivers from the ground up. One big thing that resulted from this, literally all but the X-Fi series, was sh*t out of luck, in terms of drivers releases. The latest drivers provided by Creative will allow Audigy cards to run on Vista, but without sound support past 2.0, no EAX, no CMSS, etc. So basically you have a crappy 2.0 cards.

Daniel K decided upon himself to find a solution around this and was able to mod X-Fi drivers into Audigy driver with near full functionality. We got back 5.1, EAX, CMSS, SPDIF I/O as advertised on the box.

There is also speculation that Creative purposely crippled the Audigy driver by releaseing 2.0 drivers for Vista, so the X-Fi series would have an edge.

If Creative was f*cking smart, they should hire the guy and have him work on developing good and working drivers for all their products. That's talent and they are blind to see it.

Read all about his statement of quitting and the direct link to the message from Creative:
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=Vista&thread.id=30737

Seriously, someone fixes their problem for them and they reuse to let him post about it on their forums? They have the audacity to order him to cease and desist.. they should have sent him a nice little job offer for doing what they are too incompetent to do themselves.

I wrote them off a long time ago when I was fixing a computer with a Sound Blaster Live! card that had a bad driver. I discovered that they won't even provide the drivers for it on their website because they say it's past the support cycle. Meanwhile NVidia still carries drivers for ancient NVidia VANTA and TNT2 cards on their site.

When I installed Vista x64, and heard for the first time the sound coming out of my Creative soundcard, I couldn't believe it.
Then I saw that Creative didn't provide support for my model.
I promptly removed the soundcard, connected the stereo to my motherboard, and trashed the soundcard.

Creative won't ever see a dime from me. Ever.

PS: my motherboard is an Asus... ;-)

just when a few posters hre on TG daily were convincing me to get a sound card, this happens. well i guess i'll buy one from asus? what do you guys suggest? Creative = EA in jerk level. hahaha

I was planning to buy my third Sound Blaster. I wanted a good one.

Now I just understand why my old card does no more works:
Creative wants more of my money, and want not to be loyal at me older buys.

Today Creative has lost a sale.

Bye creative. I never will see you again.

I hereby officially announce that I am leaving Creative FOR GOOD. I have taken out my Audigy2 last night and has ordered a Xonar DX from NewEgg today.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...829132006

Ok, VIsta helped noone with their sound policy.

But things like these will kill Creative eventualy, together with their pricing policy. I mean, you can't get a descent sound card (hardware EAX 4.0/5.0) for less than 100$, which translates to almost 100€ here where I live. For less, you can buy fake "X-Fi" Audio, which is a soft card anyway, so no better than integrated sound.

HELLOOOOO!!! If I want Vista this means I have only two paths - stay on integrated audio, or pay almost 100€ for X-Fi Gamer (as cheapeast hardware EAX-supporting card). 100€ for better sound? And it's still plagued by driver problems, and stuff like "pay for driver update/soft workaround (Alchemy)" schemes and I don't know what else.

I mean really, I'd like to have EAX support in Vista, but in this way? No way!

Worst thing is that I think EAX will get less and less support in future (cos of Vista), and things like OpenAl will gain traction. And as soon as this happens, there will be much more competitors to Creative than just Asus's Xonar..

Anyway, since Vista makes any sound hardware translate stuff before processing, I believe CPU driven sound ("soft" cards) will be doing it pretty soon just fine, and be competitive to current EAX.

I need 2 soundcards for independent TV-out and PC sound. And I use a Creative card as my main PC sound output. That's because it is somewhat more shielded. But I should warn you, my card is at least 7 years old, and everything in there is "software rendered". That's to prove what Fredo said: "Creative needs to watch out. Not everyone cares about X-Fi processing or EAX enough to not abandon them for a more user-friendly sound-card company.", despite me using a Creative card with historic drivers...

They promised that its features would be upgradeable through firmware releases, but then never released any upgrades...

Wow, so Creative can't even restore all functionality to Vista, and now that a another use did, they take it down and threaten legal action. Wow because they simply can't? If they can't write proper drivers, how the hell do they expect customer to think they'd be able to make new products? Ridiculous. I'm never buying another Creative card again, I'm jumping ship to Asus.

I have an Audigy 2 and the driver situation has been HORRIBLE. Not to mention the non existant technical support and horrible performance. I am looking at upgrading sound now and I am definitely NOT going to be going with creative. Sadly I haven't found a good alternative yet :(.

Was he drunk when he made the decision to delete K's post and send an angry letter? Stupid.

Firstly, I do not, and will never buy, sound cards – integrated audio provides 99% of what I need and any thing else is not worth the money.

That said did any of you even *read* to article? Here's the key piece of information:

“or other companies that Creative has licensed from”

It's likely that making certain features available on Vista went against what Creative was licensed for. Now before you say something insane like “who cares, Creative didn't create the drivers”, keep in mind that Creative needs to maintain a working relationship with their partners, and pressure from those partners could force them into this type of move.

It appears you also failed to read the article correctly. See this quote,"The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing." I take this quote as all the material being distributed by the 3rd party driver is owned by Creative, note it doesn't say any of it was licensed by Creative.

Also, what does it matter that integrated sound gives you 99% of what you need... Do you think any of us care what you're doing with your computer?

As awesome as these cards are, I'm never buying Creative again unless they start to have a little sense. It took them MONTHS to get Vista drivers out for the X-Fi cards, and even those had no DTS/DD5.1 decoding. It's not their fault that they have to re-do so much, but it sure as hell is their fault that it took them so long - MS gives manufacturers copies of Vista during development specifically so they can get drivers ready. And then ONE GUY comes along and single-handedly improves Creative's drivers? Kind of gives you some insight to the kind of people that work on drivers over at Creative...