Beta X-Fi driver adds support for features that went missing in Vista

[Ripper3]

Either they reworked the Daniel_K drivers, got him working for them, or decided to let us all play with their beta drivers while their lazy-ass developers are on another break.

Dolby® Digital and DTS® driver decode re-established for sound cards that included decoding in their Windows XP drivers (Not applicable for products that included a 3rd party software DVD player license in the package).
DVD-Audio playback re-established for sound cards that included the application in their Windows XP software suite (For Windows Vista 32-bit only).

http://support.creative.com/Product...laster&prodID=14066&prodName=X-Fi+XtremeMusic

The driver came out on the 2nd of June, but I've only just decided to update drivers.

Not sure if anyone else had spotted this, but decided to post, sorry if I missed a thread about it.

 

[panchoman]

bet that daniel_k's hand is in here

 

[Ripper3]

Ah, they also have a newly updated Linux driver, just a bit below it, supporting 32/64-bit Linux.
Well, it really seems Daniel-K helped kick their arses into gear actually.
Creative makes good soundcards, it just really needs to make software that compares with them.

EDIT:
I guess the Linux driver was mostly because OSS or ALSA, can't remember which at the moment, has added rudimentary support for X-Fis.

 

[btarunr]

Creative seems to be opening up with their drivers, to the extent of making them feature-rich, if not trouble-free. Apparently, it's company policy that 3rd party driver coders should share their code with Creative. So you know what followed. It's not that Daniel's work brought in these features though, just that increased competition is taking toll on Creative.

Ripper, that's OSS, though the OSS xfi.so module only lets you 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo output from a X-Fi card, nothing more.

 

[Ripper3]

Well, increased competition is good for us, and I do hope they continue with the driver updates.

Thanks for correcting me, and like I said, rudimentary support is still rudimentary support. Before Creative released these new Linux drivers, people on 32-bit really had no other option, and it certainly was better than no sound at all.

 

[SK-1]

Well its about time.

 

[wolf2009]

i'm new to x-fi . so what will this driver exactly do ? whats up with dolby and dts ? sorry new to this.

anyone installed this ? working perfectly ?

 

[Ripper3]

When Vista came out, it sort of changed the way that drivers and sound cards communicated or sumat. I'm really not too interested in it, so I'm not too knowledgable on the subject, but basically, the drivers needed a rework to be able to work under Vista in the same way with the features of XP, and they've now finally added them.
Basically, Vista users now have the same features from their X-Fis as XP users.

 

[wolf2009]

so does that improve sound quality in any way or EAX in games coz i am getting a crash in fear with a certain mod. without the mod the game starts and runs fine .

also i have drivers, volume panel, and alchemy installed, do i have to uninstall all these and install this beta driver and those things again ?

 

[btarunr]

The limitations that Vista sets stay. There still isn't a direct API-level interface for between DirectSound apps and the hardware, it's worked around by API-translation to OpenAL.

Features that are "new" include DD and DTS decode over SPDIF. Like any other DD/DTS decode supportive sound card, you have to configure your AC-3 filter to pass output over a working SPDIF line like, for example,:

 

[imperialreign]

so does that improve sound quality in any way or EAX in games coz i am getting a crash in fear with a certain mod. without the mod the game starts and runs fine .

also i have drivers, volume panel, and alchemy installed, do i have to uninstall all these and install this beta driver and those things again ?

no - you don't need to unistall the software to install new drivers, the driver set comes with new software that will usually copy over the files already on your PC.

the drivers won't improve sound quality, but they improve functionality and capability - Vista is the big issue, though, as the audio architecture is drastically different than with XP, there have been a lot of ongoing headaches with the drivers.

To the best of my understanding, the new beta drivers have re-enabled Dolby features for Vista, features that were removed (IMO, temporarily) from an older driver set.

If you're getting crashes with one particular game, make sure ALchemy and OpenAL are up to date (probably are anyhow).

 

[Ripper3]

This might actually be more unstable, I would hold-off on the update, these are Beta drivers for the moment, and if you don't have audio equipment compatible with Dolby Digital and DTS, then I don't think it's worth the update.

That mod will keep crashing, unless it's directly linked to the audio, and even then, it's likely it might not improve after this update.

 

[wolf2009]

EAX works fine in fear with alchemy, but with the mod the game does not start . The mod worked fine until i decided to put in alchemy's supported list of games.

 

[imperialreign]

EAX works fine in fear with alchemy, but with the mod the game does not start . The mod worked fine until i decided to put in alchemy's supported list of games.

does the mod use a spererate executable? If so, add that to the ALchemy list - it's worth a shot.

 

[wolf2009]

does the mod use a spererate executable? If so, add that to the ALchemy list - it's worth a shot.

ya , the modder told me to make a shortcut of the original exe and add something in the target line. I'll try to add it to alchemy . Thx .