Thursday, July 31st 2008
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Series Driver 2.18.0004 for Windows Vista Released
A long time has passed since Creative last released any new Vista drivers for its X-Fi audio cards. Usually new drivers are being published every single day, and they don't concern us much, but in Creative's case a new driver release can be considered a break-through. It goes even worse, because when we talk about new Creative drivers for Windows Vista we expect something new to be added, but in reward we receive only features that are supposed to work by default with this concrete product. A perfect example for my words is the brand new Windows Vista 2.18.0004 driver for Creative X-Fi cards released today. It is now here to re-establish the hardware Dolby Digital, DTS decode and DVD-Audio playback functions, that were available in Windows XP for more than two years. If you own a Creative X-Fi card just like me and you use it under Windows Vista 32/64-bit, please follow this link to download Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi series Driver 2.18.0004.
Source:
Creative
45 Comments on Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Series Driver 2.18.0004 for Windows Vista Released
Solved my issue, where winamp would say direct sound buffer not found while a song was playing and changing speakers config in Creative Control panel. I had to restart winamp to play the song. Now i can change speaker config on the fly .
I dont understand what the dolby and dts features do .
File Name: SBAX_PCDRV_LB_2_18_0001.exe
This download is a driver providing Microsoft® Windows Vista® and Windows® XP support for Creative Sound Blaster® Audigy® series audio devices. For more details, read the rest of this web release note.
This download supports the following audio devices only:
* Creative Sound Blaster Audigy including Platinum and Platinum eX series
* Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 including Platinum, Platinum eX, and Value series
* Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS including Platinum and Platinum Pro series
* Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro and Sound Blaster Audigy 4
* Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PCMCIA
support.creative.com/downloads/download.aspx?nDownloadId=10581
nice to see Vista support greatly improving.
But that has no bearing on noise distortion problems......in almost half of the games that I play.
New version of ALchemy was released as well, as well as a new version of the Console Launcher application.
new versions of almost all major Creative applications have been released as well over the last couple of weeks, and there is a new driver pack version for the Xtreme Audio cards just released today.
Look at that...
Building a new rig or thinking for goign for X-Fi.
DONT DO IT...DONT BUY ANOTHER CREATIVE PRODUCT EVER!!
The quicker this shitty company go out of business the better for all.
what a pointless reason for resurecting a thread. If you're intent was just to waste some more internet space bashing Creative, go do so with the other's on Creative's forums.
What good would come in the audio market from Creative going out? Unless you want to pay an even higher premium for audio cards compared to what we already do, and don't have any problems settling for a complete lack of innovation within the market . . . hoping for Creative's fall is no different than those who hope AMD/ATI, Intel, nVidia, Microsoft, Apple or countless other companies go under. It would serve no good purpose to the industry as whole. Unless you can cite some truly founded and rock-solid reasons for the hope in their disappearance? :wtf:
If Creative never existed, I would be sitting now with my Supreme FX card that came with my mobo and having no issues as opposed to sticking with this piece of crap fury inducing crackling popping piece of sheiss X-Fi Fatal1ty number. (yeah, music does sound a whole lot better through it which is why I stick with it.....that and I paid £100 for it).
Just because you've had issues with a card doesn't mean that every single Creative owner has, or will have issues.
Keep in mind as well, without Creative around, the cost of competing audio cards will rise, as the only big manufacturer of audio chipsets would be C-Media, and you can bet on the cost of their DSPs would climb without proper competition. And without Creative and their proprietary techonology (i.e. EAX, CMSS-3D, audio processing technologies), there would be little to no incentive for the other audio manufacturers to develop their own responses to these features, and an audio expansion card would end up being no better than the sorry-excuse-for-audio-quality onboard chipsets currently wasting space on current motherboards.