 |
 |
|
|
|
|
| news | | | Audigy™ | | | features | | | musician | | | tech/info | | | drivers | | | download | | | wishlist | | | polls | | | links |
July 2000
Its time to let us know your opinion on the latest SBLive! issues. This time round, I'd like to find out if you all think the latest Live!Ware 3 for Windows 2000 met with your expectations to improve and upgrade the features of the SBLive! card. How was your experience with the latest drivers? Take the poll! I created the previous poll after reading that many of you out there were dismayed at the often delayed driver releases that has plagued Creative of late, including the delay of the APS 2.0 drivers. Judging from the results of the poll, the majority of us do not like the way that Creative delays the drivers, and not make any announcements or apologies stating so. Instead, we waited past the release dates, and a flurry of angry newsgroup postings would ensue. Also high on the list was the fact that the driver release dates should not be revealed to the public. I'm surprised that so many of you didn't want to know the date! I would prefer that Creative release their driver development schedule, and continually update the release dates if they should change. Wouldn't that be better? Check out the poll results and if you have any thoughts, do send them in.
The EAX web site has a new page on Doppler Effect in the Sensing the Audio Environment article. Find out how the sound of fast moving objects can be changed. Never tried the Rhythmania application that comes with the SBLive? The Sound Blaster web site has a new article to teach you how to be a one-man band in 10 easy steps.
A new version of VDMSound is available. This enables some sound support in Windows NT and Windows 2000's DOS boxes, for that old DOS game that you may still have lying around.
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.
Thanks to Age Kamminga, he pointed us to the S/PDIF output pinouts. Take a look at the Digital I/O Issues page. If you have anything to contribute, like your home-made DIY solutions for digital connectivity, do share them with us.
This thread in the 3DSS Forums lists some of the problems encountered by users in the newsgroups. The drivers are just out and there are a whole lot of reported problems, requiring some unlucky folks to reformat and reinstall Windows 2000. Either these drivers are a rush job, or standards at Microsoft's WHQL have dipped!
Windows Media Player 7 is now out of beta and sports tons of new features. Grab it if you still haven't! Also, RealPlayer 8 is in beta and has several video streaming optimizations.
Fabio Soares points us to this site which has a complete installer for the APS drivers. These drivers enable 2 independent stereo analog outputs and one analog inputs, in addition to the digital ones. Great for those of us who require ASIO drivers for Cubase.
This press release sees Creative moving into the mobile market by licensing mobile and wireless technology from Parthus Technologies. No product information is revealed, but my guess is that we all can expect more interesting PDE devices.
The EAX web site has a new interview with Charles Deenen and Craig Duman from Interplay, who are working on Icewind Dale.
Hardware Extreme has an article titled Optimize your PC's Audio that focuses on speaker positioning. You can also check out our user-contributed Speaker Tips in the tech info section. Send in your own tips!
Alan Cheung, the author of the excellent GP One piano SoundFont sends us some release information: Ever wanted to own a stunningly beautiful piano soundfont for your compositions? We are proud to announce our first soundfont product: Grand Piano One (GP One), is released today! GP One is a stereo piano soundfont designed for the Sound Blaster Live family sound card which delivers studio-quality piano sounds from your computer at an affordable price. This soundfont is especially created for composers, pianists and piano music lovers. GP One features: GP One is now available to purchase online using major credit cards. We also released a playable soundfont demo and 8 new MP3 demos for your evaluation. Try them and be shocked!
Finally, after many delays, the Live!Ware 3 drivers for Windows 2000 are released. The main disappointment would be that AC-3 output for popular DVD players like PowerDVD and WinDVD still do not work. You can go to the Live!Ware Page for the complete package with updated apps, or just get the basic drivers. A news posting at NT Compatible mentions that the following files are upgraded by this driver release: sblfx.dll 5.12.1.3101 to 5.12.1.3200 Mikael over at 3DSS also has this to say of the new drivers: I just tried the Live drivers (using a Live card) and it's just standlone release of the drivers, nothing more. According to newsgroups post they work well for most people but there is currently no AC3 support with WinDVD or PowerDVD. It's currently uncertain if the drivers lack AC3 pass-thru support or if it's PowerDVD and WinDVD that lack AC3 pass-thru support under Windows 2000. When it comes to games most people report that they work fine in Diablo II, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament to name a few. I've seen one complaint that EAX 2.0 games experience inverse distance volume problem (sounds right beside you are very very faint, sounds far away are loud). As always there is people that have issues in most cases crackling with VIA or dual CPU motherboards. It's far from all people with VIA chipsets or dual CPUs got crackling though. I've so far only tried the UT Demo, Audio Winbench 99 and Half-Life. The Audio WinBench 99 reports rather poor performance with 13% CPU utilization for 16 3D streams and 30% with 32 3D Streams on my slow Celeron 450A. DirectSound (stereo) performance is also relatively slow compared to Windows98. In Half-Life the hit for enabling DS3D with EAX is less than 1 fps (<5%) which is about the same as under Windows98 so possible that Audio Winbench isn't working well under Windows2000. Also possible the Half-Life benchmark got some issues on my machine under Windows2000 since even with sound disabled my framerate is cut to half compared to Windows98. The UT demo benchmark crashed when I run it. It's possible the crash is related to my graphics card or the A3D files I had installed.
Creative has a new article titled Basics of SoundFonts. You can also download some SoundFont goodies from here.
Creative has a EAX and Diablo II Sweepstakes where you can stand to win a Sound Blaster Live! Platinum, a set of FPS2000 Speakers, and an EAX T-shirt.
Eurogamer has an article on DirectPlay Voice, which will be included in the upcoming DirectX 8. This technology will be built into Windows and allows you to talk while playing games! This has some potential if you have got the bandwidth.
NetKills has a short review of the SBLive!
Tech Extreme has a 2 part speaker review. Part 1 covers the Klipsch ProMedia v.2-400 and the Videologic DigiTheatre speakers. Part 2 compares the Cambridge SoundWorks Desktop Theater 5.1 DTT2500 speaker system with the MidiLand S4 8200.
VDMSound provides sound support to DOS apps running in Windows NT and Windows 2000. Its is up to version 1.0.1 now.
Harvey Fong from Creative posted this in the newsgroups: Actually it's Friday morning in Singapore. It will most likely be posted on the Singapore server before the Americas one. It will most likely be posted during the evening or middle of the night (for us in the Western Hemisphere) or early morning for those in Europe. If it doesn't go up tonight, then I'd guess they'll be shooting for Monday (Sunday night in the West). I've just checked the Singapore servers and no sign of it yet. If Creative is telling the truth, then we can expect to see it sometime this week!
Its been some time since there was a review of the X-Gamer. Check out JDAlpha's review. As pointed out at 3DSS, the author mentions that EAX 3.0 is out, which is not correct. Many people out there think that Live!Ware 3.0 has EAX 3.0 support, but it doesn't. EAX 3.0 will be supported in a future release of Live!Ware. Would it be version 4 or will it be delayed? Time will tell... For more information SBLive! products, you can check out this page.
I'm all for MIDI soundtracks in games, however, developers chose to do it the easy way by playing back pre-recorded wave audio during gameplay, or so says this editorial from GA Hardware.
According to a post by Harvey Fong from Creative in the newsgroups, the drivers will be released once they are approved and certified by Microsoft's WHQL for the Windows 2000 environment.
Creative has updated their website with new features. There are several interviews with the sound guys from Bioware (Baldur's Gate II), EA Sports games and MDK 2. Also added is a new page on reveberation.
|
Our Sponsor:  |
|||||||||||
|
|
||
 Back To Top |
h t t p : // a l i v e . s i n g n e t . c o m . s g
|
Copyright © 1998-2003 ALive! and its writers.
|
