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September 2000
Soldier of Fortune EAX Enhancements Creative will release enhancements to Raven's Soldier of Fortune in 3 separate downloads. They have added dynamically changing reverbs, obstruction & occlusion filtering, and adjusted sound source parameters to many of the multiplayer and single player levels. The first update adds effects for the multiplayer levels. Check out the EAX website for more details!
Wow, that was fast! Right after my article on the upcoming 5.1 Sound Blasters, Creative announced them all, including new Cambridge SoundWorks speakers. But there are several variations of these products worldwide. Check out the Coming Soon! article for the full scoop. We have links to the PDF brochures for the DTT2200 and DTT3500 speakers, to be available in October!
ManniX had this to say about the upcoming Live!Ware 4: I saw the LW4 beta at Creative booth, and they already put a DVD software player inside. The staff said they made in-house, not a thirdy party program. This is one year ago! Wondering what they made in one year... I saw also a very cool speakers calibration applet. I wonder if the DVD playback and decoding only works on the new 5.1 Sound Blasters, or also the existing versions.
The EAX site has started a contest that gives out EAX-enabled prizes every week. This week, its a FPS2000 speaker system, a copy of Dogs of War and a limited edition EAX T-Shirt.
Lars Ahlzen from Live!center sent me news of this article: A new article was added to Live! center today. The article describes how to create a bootdisk with SB16 emulation, very useful for games that won't run under Windows 95/98, if you're having problems with the SB16 emulation, or if you're running e.g. Windows 2000.
Here's the official press release from Creative on their acquisition of Aureal's remaining assets. Thanks to Harvey from Creative for sending this to me. For full coverage of the whole Aureal vs Creative saga, check out our article titled Aureal vs Creative (what else?!).
Sharky Extreme has an article comparing the leading software DVD players in the market: PowerDVD, WinDVD, and VaroDVD. Insane Hardware has a review of the Sound Blaster Live! Platinum as they gave it a rating of 8/10.
In anticipation of the soon-to-be-announced Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 products, I've written an article titled The 5.1 Sound Blaster which talks about what we can (and hope) to expect from these new cards. In it, you'll learn how Creative can implement 5.1 output, what kinds of speaker systems can be used, and what Live!Ware and driver upgrades and features we can expect from the new cards. I'll also speculate on the possibility that existing users may not need to upgrade to a 5.1 Sound Blaster to enjoy the new Dolby Digital decoding and 5.1 positioning features. Check out these pictures of the new 5.1 speaker applet and additional center & subwoofer output on the layout of the new Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 card!
Creative Japan has announced 2 new products for the Japanese market, including the Sound Blaster Live! Platinum Plus and the Sound Blaster Live! Digital Audio 2. The Platinum Plus comes with a remote control and a brand new Live!Drive called Live!Drive IR that looks just like a Live!Drive 2 with a IR receiver for the remote control. Check out the updated Sound Blaster Live! in Japan article for more information!
Thanks to Mitz and Neil Yates from Envy News for the tipoff!
The EAX web site has an interview with Jean-Marc Jot, Creative's 3D Audio Researcher. He talks about EAX, the Nomad Jukebox, and falls just short of announcing the new features in the December drivers!
CNET and GameSpot are reporting that Creative has acquired Aureal Semiconductor (or what's left of it) for $32 million. The purchase include patents, trademarks and other intellectual property, effectively ending the courtroom battles between both parties. More information and the press release is available at Vortex of Sound. Check out the updated Aureal vs Creative page for the history of the legal battles between both companies.
There is a new version of LAVA! Player with many new features, including Direct3D & OpenGL support, and a fast frame mode for up to 50 frames per second. You can also enter a contest when you download the player.
Jason Hoggs from Futurelooks sent us news of their tutorial titled SB Live! and Vienna Sound Font Studio: What Bliss! which covers on the basics of using Vienna to create your own SoundFonts.
Live!center has an interview with the band "Havana". The interview also has some music from the band which you can download.
A special release of Sound Control Plus v1.79a previously only available for mailing list subscribers has been kindly made available to readers of ALive! by Paul McKnight of Really Effective Software. It includes several bug fixes and new features. Do check it out! Please check the download section for the password.
Anandtech has a Speaker Buyer's Guide that talks about how to read specifications, and the several audio formats available.
After the world's biggest computer show banned MP3-related exhibits, a Creative manager announced that the company will not take part in the show.
Mark over at 3DsoundSurge has a news posting of official new products that are due to be announced by end of September: We still don't have any official details but the cat is officially out of the bag now so we will post what we have. By officially out of the bag, I mean the new products are showing up in wholesale catalogues and at online retailers such as buy.com, with pricing, but without specifications. Specifically we are talking about the Desktop Theater DTT3500 Digital 5 Satellites Subwoofer Decoder BX, the SoundWorks Playworks PS2000 Digital Speaker SubWoofer (which is one we do officially know about), the SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer 5.1 and the SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1. Thanks to 703 for the pointer. What we have in addition to this thanks to some serious digging by an anonymous outside source is the new soundblasters have an ETA of around the end of this month and as you would gather from the new names, the SB Live lineup is being updated with onboard 5.1 support (6 channels of analog output from the card). They also had news of a product called the PC-DVD Ovation which apparently is a cost effective DVD solution using software decoding. We will hopefully have an offical update sometime soon on these products.
This article from Tech Zone talks about the new features to be incorporated in the latest incarnation of DirectX, including enhancements to DirectSound and DirectSound3D.
The EAX site has a new interview with Nathan d'Obrenan, co-founder and Lead Programmer of Firetoad Software. They talk about the sound in Everglade Rush, a nice-looking hovercraft racer.
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.
Live!center is reporting that there is an unofficial driver release available here. Be very sure you want to install them as recent WDM driver releases on Windows 2000 has proven to be buggy.
Lars sends news of another interview with finnish SBLive! musician, Pertti Husu.
Wolvie3985.com has a short review of the FPS2000 speakers that come with Mini-DIN connection. They rated it a high 9.5/10.
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