Other points. [LWN.net]

Other points.

Posted Mar 31, 2008 1:03 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
Parent article: A creative example of the value of free drivers

Others have mentioned that there are some "re-enabled" features that involve third-party
licensing, such as realtime Dolby Digital encoding.

It's certainly possible that Creative is under contractual obligation to not provide some of
the features that were disabled, and could be legally liable to said third party.

That said, Creative has always had decent hardware (for its time), but to put it mildly, their
official drivers have always left something to be desired.  (Though Microsoft shares some of
the responsibility for Creative's horrid Vista driver mess.. but it's been more than a year)

Meanwhile, As I type this, My wife is watching a CSI episode with an old SBLive, and I have an
Audigy ZS card stuck in my laptop.  The Linux drivers (first OSS, later ALSA) drivers have
always been top-notch.

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Other points.

Posted Mar 31, 2008 17:29 UTC (Mon) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link]

That said, Creative has always had decent hardware (for its time)

Not really. When I picked up a Gravis Ultrasound Classic in 1992, I was amazed to discover that PC sound cards could actually make good sound. Creative's "state of the art" hardware at the time was still doing FM synthesis, and it took them a few years to release the AWE32 to match it.

"Quality" is so meaningless...

Posted Mar 31, 2008 19:03 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Again, the hardware was decent, *for its time*.  It's not really fair to compare FM synthesis
to wavetable synthesis, but Creative did have a wavetable synth available when the GUS was
released; it just cost more.

The GUS had both good and bad points, but the original model's audio "quality" made the SB16
sound pro-grade, and that's not even considering the GUS's lack of 16-bit recording
capabilities.  True, the SB16 was FM-only, but it had a little expansion port that let one
tack on a wavetable synth daughtercard.  Creative called theirs the WaveBlaster.  

The AWE32 came later, integrating a new wavetable synth that was vastly superior to the GUS's,
but shared the same basic problem of being non-MIDI compatible -- which meant zero game
support. (The Emu8K was also re-used for a GM-compatible daughtercard that Creative sold as
the WaveBlaster2) However, the AWE32 still retained the FM synth, which meant that you still
got music in games that didn't support the GUS (which was most of 'em)

The rise of CD-ROMs ended up killing the synths on sound cards, as it was jut simpler (and
sounded better for 99% of their customers) to just record a high-quality audio track and be
done with it.

And yes, I still have an AWE32 (+8M), a GUS (1M), a Roland MT-32, and a Roland SCB-15
daughtercard.  Only the latter two are still in (occasional) use, as they have a standard MIDI
interfaces.

"Quality" is so meaningless...

Posted Apr 1, 2008 2:09 UTC (Tue) by walken (subscriber, #7089) [Link]

> The GUS had both good and bad points, but the original model's audio "quality" made the SB16
sound pro-grade

Hmmm - I have the exact opposite memory. For me, the GUS was the first card I had where I
could not tell what my CPU and disk were doing by listening to audio parasites on the line
out.

Whatever - this is 15 years ago, not really relevant now.

Other points.

Posted Apr 2, 2008 6:24 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

It's certainly possible that Creative is under contractual obligation to not provide some of the features that were disabled, and could be legally liable to said third party.

This way of shifting the blame is not very credible: if Creative is not able to negotiate with said third parties and end up with a good contract (one which actually lets its customers use its products) then it is a crappy company which doesn't care about its customers at all.

Negotiating a better contract?

Posted Apr 4, 2008 0:14 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

Isn't the same argument used to explain why NVidia "can't" release source code to their
drivers, even if they want(ed) to?

Negotiating a worse contract

Posted Apr 4, 2008 6:27 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Yes, but you realize the difference. A company that licenses some code only for its release in binary form is not hurting its users. But a company that licenses code only for a specific version of the operating system is setting an expiry date on its drivers, and so effectively on the hardware as well. Or at least on a feature of the hardware.