I bought the Live Platinum about a year ago now, as it was marketed as being both for gamers and hobby musicians. The hobby musician part of this is critical to me - if Creative hadn't claimed the card was suitable for hobby musicians, I wouldn't have bought it.

The supposedly full version of Cubasis isn't - it excludes VST instrument support. When you exhaust the possibilities of soundfonts (which are just overblown samples after all, and pretty difficult to create if you haven't got the real instruments to sample) you have the choice of spending hundreds or thousands on real hardware gear or buying soft synths. For the hobby musician with a limited budget, the latter is the most realistic option. Obviously VST instruments are the ideal for soft synths, but the included cut down 'full' cubasis doesn't support them.

So I bought the real full Cubasis - and THEN I discover that there is no ASIO support for the live, and that the latency on VST instruments makes them unplayable.

There have been rumours of ASIO driver support for at least a year now - spread by Creative representatives via a reviewer in Future Music most recently, and I believe in an interview about a year ago in Computer Music. So why isn't there so much as a statement on the subject on the web site? and why don't the support people know what I'm talking about when I ask?

Add to this the stupid user interface (it took me ages to realise those little red warning-LED-looking things in the Mixer were actually buttons), and the poor reliability (pretty much exactly one year after purchase my Line-In seems to be dead for no particular reason) and the fact the support e-mail facility always shows a message claiming unprecedented demand is causing the four day delay for replies (can it REALLY be unprecedented when its been happening for a year!), the lack of a single central program which will control all the Lives options, and god knows how many other irritations and more serious flaws, and the whole thing is clearly pants.

If you ask me, Creatives past success has gone to their head. They are convinced they can stay successful while dumping on their customers. Well here's one customer who will NOT be buying anything with a Creative label on it again.

Creative stands for NO SUPPORT, DELAYED/CANCELLED DRIVERS, GETTING BEHIND IN THE MARKET, ABOUT TO LOOSE LOSTS OF CUSTOMERS.

My 2 cents

2000 was a bad year for SoundBlaster, for me, because they didn't have any quality upgrades from my AWE64. Sure, there's the EM10K1 chip, but it's suppose to have some issues with the VIA motherboard chipsets (which is what my system runs on, an Apollo 133A chipset). The SBLive-5.1 soundblasters came out, but they weren't the upgrade jump from the original SBLive EMU10K1 architechture that I would have liked. I want to feel good about the purchase I make with my hard-earned money; and the current new products just didnt' make me feel that way. I did purchase the MP3-5.1, but I returned it, unimpressed.

After all these years, and architecture development (I know the EMU10K2 chip is being worked on), Creative has got to come up with something worth our hard-earned money for upgrades.

I'm totally disappointed beacause Creative is never going to release any APS 2.0 driver. They promised us all heaven. And they didn't manage to give us anything.

I've opened my eyes and bought another soundcard. Check out EGOSYS WAMIRACK 24.

I voted for Very disappointed. And why. Well I was quite happy with LiveWare in Windows 98 but now I upgraded to Windows 2000 and Creative Labs Support for this OS is just pathetic. I tried friend's Santa Cruz and had no problems with it. With SB Live I have a lot of problems.

I hope they stop telling people that Windows 2000 is not OS for games/consumers and similliar bullshit. If they don't know all next versions of Windows will be based upon enhanced Windows 2000 core and if they are not ready now then I guess they will never be and I will switch to Santa Cruz.

Why live sux?

Creative Driver support under win2k.
The drivers for the most part are ok. But Creative don't seem to care about keeping their customers up to date on where they are with fixing bugs. These are the things that affect me.

When you login, unless you have disabled the startup sound you will be lifted out of your seat by the volume, no matter what you do to turn it down.

EAX in most games I have is awful. Really, really loud. EAX seems to ignore the ingame volume controls. The only way to fix it is to disable hardware acceleration or turn off eax. Makes me wonder why I even bothered 'upgrading' to a live if I have to turn off the good stuff.

When you login after installing live3 for win2k, for some reason your computer will just pause for a short period.

But the worst problem of all is creative. I am prepared to wait for a fix. But they won't even acknowledge that there are problems, let alone if they are working on a fix for them. On their newsgroups they come across as arrogant, and they really seem to hate being critisised.

I can understand that they don't want to give a date in case they miss it. But could they at least let us know that they are working on it.

The scary thing is that I saw mention on the newsgroup that these are the drivers that will be used on whistler.

And the even more scary thing is that a student came out with a fix for some of the problems that creative haven't made a move on since liveware3 was released for win2k.

I bought a Live! card because the PCI 128 i had was totally non functional in win2k, lots of BSOD's and lockups. Also, my gf's machine needed a new sound card so i thought why not.

I have a bp6 with two cpu's humming along, and it didnt take me long to discover that the liveware drivers where absolutely not any good at all. Lockups, BSOD's, and mediaplayer has synchronization problems (which makes it nearly impossible to enjoy a flic).

liveware 3 only increased the problems from lw2, so i cannot say im at all happy with the past year.

Its all about the drivers. First, they have been slow on getting them out. Second, when the finally came out they were buggy and missing features. I give Creative a D for support.

as much as i liked windows 2000 better than 98, i evenutally had to go back because of the problem with midi and the sblive/liveware drivers for win2k. i'd hit the key on my midi keyboard and the sound from my soundfont would play like 3-5 seconds later. it was ridiclous and unusable. the dumbest part is that playback is fine, it just wouldnt accept properly though the midi in. just lame...

well fellers,

the reason is simple. me as a musician, im waiting for years that sblive does FINALY ASIO drivers. i cant be so damn hard. a simple ASIO driver would be okay. no need for useless crap like lava player 9.22 or such. WE JUST WANT ASIO SUPPORT. thats it.

but i guess creative is more interested in seeling lotsa sound cards. i never seen such a bad hardware support. im pretty disapointed bout their team. hell, look at their samplers (emu/creative)

they do decent stuff. creative now even consists of EMU, ENSONIQ and itself and they are not able to do drivers ? man this is ridiculous... thats all i can say about

I am completely disappointed with Creative in 2000 for the continued lack of support and updates to their existing products while they continue to develop and release new products. I want a LiveWare update now...

I think Liveware for Win2K is terrible. EAX support in many games is broken. The AC3 passthrough is non-functional. DirectSound in some applications and games pops, skips, and jumps out of sync. I'm not interested in a brand new Liveware package; I just want good, functional drivers.

I vote that I was really dissapointed with Creative SBLive! drivers for windows 2000 for
various reasons.

First, they were too late, really to late, they should have their drivers ready when Win2k was released, they have lots of beta versions to check them. Anyway I wouldn't mind waiting if we had get some decent drivers, but, surprise! the drivers was so bad that I wonder how Creative could be paying those programmers (nothing personal here ...:-). SMP is broken, AC3 Passthrough doesn't work, we get half the apps that we have already got with LiveWare 3.

You could say the Win2K (or Windows NT before) is a system hard to support because it has more control over your hardware than Win98, but the thing is that Linux drivers drivers are really good and far more stable than Win2K drivers, and Linux really controlls your hardware and also have SMP.

They are developed also by Creative (which shows us that they could be done it better) and the programmers doing that have far less info on the Emu10k1 than people working on closed source drivers, if Creative would release some info on the Emu10k1 for example, how to enable AC3 passthrough (or what is the same, what dammed bit has to be set in the stream to make Emu10k1 pass it to the S/PDIF output without "fixing" it) and release the effects they have in LiveWare3 even in binary form for the OpenSource drivers, linux drivers would be almost perfect.

In fact I must say that I installed Win2K but thanks to the "very dissapointing" drivers from Creative I switch back to Windows NT, whose drivers are also far from perfect (anybody knows if AC3 is "officially" supported under NT?) but they are better than Win2K, which leads us to the final question:

Has anybody ever released drivers worse than previous drivers? I supposed that when you get version 2.0 you get something better than version 1.0. Anyway Creative is the 'de facto' standard and they are paying people to develop Linux drivers what is really good... I just hope that the 'soon-to-be-released-so-don't-count-on-it-before-august' Liveware 4 will fixes those bugs, although it may be even worse than Liveware 3, who knows?

I am really disappointed because of the hyped programable emu101k chip that allows further technologies and evolution with just software updates and blah blah .. and nothing new from creative showed up... the live is as good as it was when it came out...

How long does one have to wait for quality drivers that take advantage of the hardware when running an OS such as Win2K? Remember when the original SB Live came out and said it support NT 4 on the actual box? Hahah.. that was a joke.

Lack of a beta program from creative, poor customer service, static (even on NON VIA chipset MBs), blue screens, bad install/uninstall, need I go on?

Some say NT is not a gaming platform, and you should run Win9X. Well, I am sorry, Win9x platform is dead. Whistler personal edition is the next future step. If Creative doesn't improve they loose. Some feel they have already lost.

My 2 cents at least - your opinion may differ.

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