Drivers & Live!Ware information are available in the Drivers section.

Sound Control 2.15

Sound Control is a freeware replacement Windows Sound Mixer applet which together with most of the features of the standard Windows mixer it also allows you to add hot keys to adjust any combination of your sound mixer volumes. Support to control Winamp with a series of hot keys, CD Player and an On Screen Display is also included. Supports Windows 95 / 98 / NT4 / 2000 / XP and Millennium-Me. Get it from Really Effective Software.

Surround Mixer Launcher

This utility from Matt Foster lets you load up the Surround Mixer instead of the default Windows mixer when you click on the volume control tray icon.

I got tired of the boring windows mixer loading instead of the surround mixer when I click the speaker in the tray, so i made a small program which replaces the sndvol32.exe in the win directory. It reads the location of the mixer from the registry and runs it.....

I have only tested it in WinME and Win2000 (with Windows file protection disabled). Although it will work on any system where the registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Creative Tech\Creative Surround Mixer\Path

If anyone is interested, it can be downloaded from www.mattfoster.clara.co.uk. Tell me what you think!

DirectX 8
10 November 2000 - Clarence

Microsoft has released DirectX 8, offering improved support for 3D graphic cards, networking, including support for DLS2 and I3DL2 (Interactive 3-D Audio, Level 2) which is essentially EAX 2.0. Download it from the DirectX site.

Although Microsoft claims that DirectX cannot be uninstalled, TweakTown also has a DirectX 8 Uninstaller. Another uninstaller is available here.

VDMSound: Sound Support in DOS Box for Windows NT/2000

VDMSound aims to offer some form of compatibility with DOS applications that need to access the sound card. It can emulate a MPU-401 MIDI UART, as well as SB16 for wave output. Do let me know if it works for a SBLive!

AC97 Mixer

Alex Mina sends news of his AC97 mixer that works with many PCI sound cards that has a AC97 CODEC, including the SBLive! It works for both Win9x and WinNT.

Parametric EQ Patch

Many of you have been asking for this feature in our wish list, and finally someone has managed to provide this feature as an Environmental Audio preset. This patch allows far greater control over the equalization across the sound spectrum, compared to the primitive bass and treble controls found on the SBLive! mixer. You can set whether to boost or lower a certain range of frequencies. >>

MegaFont

MegaFont is a freeware to allow you to dynamically load and unload SoundFont files to the SBLive!

BankMan 2000

Christopher Seaton sends news of his bank loader utility:

This program is a simple bank loader, that allows the user to save the bank configuration to a file. BankMan is not as complicated or feature laiden as the other virtual bank loading programs available on the Net, however it does it's job well enough for me to use on a daily basis in my project studio while running multiple resource intensive studio programs and is extremely simple to use.

You can find out more about the BankMan 2000 utility and download the beta version at http://www.sonitus.com/bankman.

SounFont Express Loader

This app replaces the SF Bank Manager that comes with Live!Ware. Musicians will dig this one! Click here to go to the home page to download it.

CDFS.VXD: Easy CD Ripping

What you can do with it: You can access each CD audio track direct from the disc as a normal WAV file. The VXD provides the WAVs in several sampling rates! You won't need to use CD ripping software like WinDAC or AudioCatalyst. Just load up the MP3 compressor and point it to the WAV files in your CD-ROM drive! Now you just need to remember one thing - You got it from ALive! :>

How to install:

1. Go to C:\Windows\System\IOSubSys\ and rename the CDFS.VXD to CDFS.OLD.
2. Copy the CDFS.VXD that you have downloaded from our site into C:\Windows\System\IOSubSys\.
3. Shutdown your Windows and reboot your PC.
4. Put in a CD-Audio disc (non-multisession) and look into the disc with either Windows Explorer or MSDOS. Viola!

Remember to backup your original CDFS.VXD before replacing it, so that in event that your system crashes, you can replace it with the original file. Only tested on Windows 9x. James Adams reports that it is also working in WinMe. Let us know if it works on other Windows version too.

[Download CDFS.VXD]

If you have discovered a cool software that would be useful for other SBLive! users, do drop us a mail!

Discovered more cool stuff to download? Let us know!

Digital Audio Plugins

A professional quality reverb plugin is available at Jezars Free Digital Audio plugins for Windows. Available in DirectX and VST versions.

LiveSynth Pro DXi
If you do not have a Sound Blaster Live! but still want SoundFont capability, LiveSynth is a software synthesizer that works with SoundFont 2.0 and any Windows sound card.

MIDI Utilities & Applications

LiveControl from XPLAIN allows you to control all the parameters in the EMU synth! There are also many other stuff for AWE owners!

SoundFonts     

Studio AX
A developer that produced the excellent Grand Piano One SoundFont.

A Reference SoundFont
submitted by Brian Scanlon

A beta of a new soundfont has been released from a cool author, and is available at hammer sound under collections, namely Fluid. It isn't done yet, but it is the best sounding font created to date, and it is free as well. It is also very very large, 64 MB uncompressed. Any how, any musicians looking for a professional sounding font NEED to check this one out. When it is finally completed, it will easily be the reference font for the SBLive! It is also important to note, it brings out the 32 MB limitation in the current drivers of the SBLive! So, when sounds exceed 32 MB of playing, you have to dump and reload this 64 MB font. This is something that you should pressure Creative about, as this is the font to demonstrate this card.

Bjorn Lynne
One of the composers using a SBLive! in his studio.

DanceFonts

E-MU Official SoundFont Site

HammerSound
One of the best places for free SoundFonts!

Final Fantasy SoundFont Project
A SoundFont for the MIDI music that is played in Final Fantasy VIII on the PC.

Groove Dealer
Some free groove SoundFonts

Instrument X
developer of 'Midi-Instruments with Acoustic Performance'

Sample Arena

Silverspring 1.2 GM Soundfont

Here's a SoundFont specially designed for listening to classic game soundtracks back when most games were still using MIDI. Its a 64 MB SoundFont bank, but fortunately the zipped version weighs in at a much smaller 34 MB.

Silverspring 1.2 is a compilation soundfont made for listening to classic games' MIDI soundtracks. Made out of free instruments and banks found on the 'net, as well as with some instruments by the author, it's quite large at 64 MBs. It should be worth having for the fans of classic games who can spare that much memory :-P It is a GM soundfont 2 with GS drumkits (standard, room, power, electronic, TR-808, brush, orchestra, kick & snare [SC-88], Alesis HR-16B, FX [SC-88], CM-64/32L).

Download: Location 1 | Location 2
Demo MP3 1: Location 1 | Location 2
Demo MP3 2: Location 1 | Location 2

The Sound Site
This site has a huge MIDI and SoundFont collection.

SoundFont Page (Polish)

Synchronic Beats

TGSF

Up Metal! Studio

Sound and Wave Files

FindSounds is a search engine that enables you to search for sound files.