Creative Applications
As usual, the Audigy comes with a suite of applications and utilities designed to help you get the most out of the card:
- Creative Taskbar: A streamlined version of the Creative Launcher bundled with the Live! It now only has a similar "Live!Task" feature and does not include the other tabs. A tray icon is also placed in the taskbar for quick access.
- Audigy Online Quick Start
- Audigy Experience: A demo to showcase the features of the Audigy
- EAX ADVANCED HD Gold Mine Experience
- Creative Diagnostics
- Creative Wave Studio: A simple wave editing application that goes way back to the early years of the Sound Blaster
- Creative PlayCenter 3: The core media player application with support for MP3/WMA playback and ripping, CD burning, and the EAXAHD music enhancements (Audio Clean-Up, DREAM and Time Scaling)
- Creative Recorder: A simple wave recorder
- Creative Oozic Reactor: The 3D visualization app formerly known as LAVA!
- Vienna SoundFont Studio 2.3: The most important tool for musicians who use SoundFonts
- Creative MiniDisc Center: A simple app to assemble a playlist and play it back for a MD recorder. Pauses are inserted in between tracks so that the recorder will place track marks.
- Creative RemoteCenter: Works with the IR receiver on the Audigy Drive to provide remote control capabilities. Includes RemoteCenter Player which allows playback of many media types and discs like Video CDs, audio CDs and DVDs.
- SoundFont Showcase: Demonstrates the quality of some of the new instrument sounds that can be uploaded to the Audigy for MIDI composition
Most of these apps were also bundled with the Live! The Audigy adds the new EAX Gold Mine Experience demo and also upgrades many core applications to support the Audigy. These include the Surround Mixer, Taskbar, PlayCenter (now version 3) and AudioHQ.
Visually, many of Creative's applications have undergone a change from the Live! and are not using the murky black-grey-yellow color scheme. They now match the blue-white color scheme we first saw in PlayCenter 2 (also available for Live! users). Live! users will have to contend with the old scheme and features until Creative decides to release new utilities (which unfortunately, is rather unlikely).
The drivers are of course different from the Live! and a new installation method is used. Instead of manually pointing Windows to the location of the drivers when the card is first installed and detected, the drivers should be installed by running the installation CD before the Audigy is plugged into the PC. This makes setup much easier since Windows can get cranky and continually ask for the location of certain installation files when the common method is used.
AudioHQ is the Control Panel of the Sound Blaster, and many of the other applets are accessible from here. It can be found in Windows' Control Panel and the Start menu.
Allows modification of output sample rate, heapdhone muting with the Audigy Drive and S/PDIF Bypass to route the digital input of the Audigy Drive directly to the digital output..
The sampling rate can be changed between 44.1, 48 and 96 kHz
Finally, there is an option to automatically switch to Headphone speaker mode when the jack is used on the Audigy Drive. Muting is available on the Live! but not the auto-switching to Headphone mode.
You'll also notice the first Device Controls screenshot does not have an Audigy Drive tab because it was removed in early shipments of the Platinum and Platinum eX due to driver bugs that Creative could not fix in time for release. Download the updated drivers from Creative to add the Audigy Drive tab.
The EAX presets are now categorized into three different types: ENV, EQ and FX. This is much better than the Live! where all presets are lumped together into one huge list. ENV are the environmental presets like cave and concert hall. EQ are presets like jazz, pop and rock - suitable for music. FX are audio effects like karaoke pitch shifting, guitar and vocal effects. A Custom category stores the presets that you have modified and saved.
You'll also notice that instead of displaying the amount in percent (in the Live!), dB is now used to represent the volume more accurately. The game presets for games like Starcraft found in the Live! are also removed for the Audigy since it has been 3 years and many games now come with EAX support. Also, these effects are now available on any speaker mode, and not tied to a particular speaker configuration (2, 4, 5.1 or headphone speaker modes). Creative does listen, because there's a parametric equalizer here as well, something that people had to hack to obtain in the Live! drivers. Much better!
A simple keyboard application that allows mouse clicks on the virtual keyboard to generate MIDI messages. It was available since the days of the Sound Blaster AWE cards and the Live! as well.
Allows loading and configuration of SoundFont banks. Good news here - the 32 MB limit of the Live! is now removed! The Audigy can load large SoundFont banks without breaking a sweat. (There have been some problems with SoundFont playback with the early drivers. Download the latest drivers from Creative to fix this.)
On my system with 512 MB of RAM, it goes up to 479 MB, but PCs with more system RAM can go higher
If there's one app that you use daily with the sound card, it'll probably be the mixer. Let me just say that the surround mixer is much better than the one in the Live! and has a much simpler interface.
Gone is the confusing super preset feature in the Live! that save presets and mixer settings together. Worse, each saved setting is tied down to a speaker mode so once the speaker mode is changed to a different one when the setting is saved, it disappears. You're confused? So am I!
The mixer is slightly different from the one in the Live! Here are some of the notable changes:
- The volue and bass/treble controls are moved from the right to the left and the recording slider is moved from the left to the right
- The Wave/MP3, MIDI, CD Audio and Line-In sliders cannot be changed to other sliders, while the three sliders to the right (with the icons on square buttons) can be clicked and changed to others. (Previously on the Live! mixer, all the six input sliders could be changed but this is now limited to two on the Audigy's mixer.)
- The spectrum analyzer is removed
- Live!Task is removed
- The ability to position each sound source individually is removed
- In the recording slider, the CD Audio, Line In, Auxiliary, TAD, PC Speaker inputs are combined into a single item labeled "Analog Mix"
A screenshot of the Live! mixer for comparison
The balance and front/rear balance sliders are moved to a Balance/Fade window which can be accessed by clicking the Bal/Fade button. You can change the position of all the sound playing back through the Audigy by dragging and moving the yellow dot around. If the Audigy is in stereo or headphone mode, the dot will only move horizontally from left to right.
 
The Settings button in the Speaker controls pops up a Settings window with the ability to set the multi-speaker options, including enabling of Dolby Digital AC-3 decoding and control the volume of the center and subwoofer speakers. More about this in the next page of the review on surround sound.
SMP are PCs with more than one CPU and this caused alot of problems for the Live! in Windows 2000. Fortunately, it has been rectified by late 2001 and the Audigy works with SMP systems out of the box.
Creative improves on the already nice suite of
software and applications that were first developed and bundled with the Live! No major changes here, but things are definitely streamlined and easier to use. The useless and clunky stuff are removed and presets take up less registry space, which results in better performance and usability.
Of course, we'd prefer more control for the advanced things that could be done with the card, like audio routing features found in the APSLive drivers. But for the general consumer, this is good enough.
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