LWN: Comments on "A creative example of the value of free drivers"

Creative's customers

jengelh — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:54:51 +0000

Just because there is a perhaps long period between buying new hardware  significant hardware
purchases of mine were Dec '97, Mar '03, seems like a 5+ year cycle  and thus being most
likely a "past customer" as you call it, this does not mean that I could not be a future
customer of the particularly hardware vendors I am biased towards. That is, unless they make
such a fuss.

A creative example of the value of free drivers

nlucas — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:21:30 +0000

Fair enough. My selection of the "cherish" word was a bad one.

My point is only that we actually depend on the law, or we couldn't force users to "show us
the code".

A creative example of the value of free drivers

wblew — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:53:54 +0000

There is no question that Creative has the legal right to grief the users of their older
hardware products.

For me, the issue isn't their legal rights, but their corporate arrogance.

As a result, I have taken my business elsewhere, as is _my_ legal right.

Realistically? The arrival of good sounding motherboard audio hardware has shrunk Creative's
market for their gaming related audio PC hardware.

Yesterday, I was using a Creative card connected to one of their digital speaker systems to
listen to my Windows games' surround sound, with XP.

Today, I am using my ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard's onboard audio hardware's DTS
interactive feature (encoding DTS digital surround sound in real time) to listen to my Windows
games' surround sound on my new Z-5500 speakers, with Vista.

Note: No Creative hardware or software anywhere and the sound is GREAT!

PS: The audio situation is unfortunate in that the Dolby Digital and DTS digital standards are
both proprietary with the associated licensing costs and legal limitations.

IMO that really limits the ability to implement those standards within open source software.

A creative example of the value of free drivers

nix — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:57:15 +0000

I don't 'cherish' copyright law. It has to be tolerated, as the law of the 
land, but nobody says we have to *like* it. (Indeed the GPL license in 
particular is an attempt to end-run around it by producing a pool of works 
within which one can act as if copyright law did not exist beyond 'show me 
the source'.)

Drivers and 3rd-party vendor software bugs

gouyou — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:05:46 +0000

A lot of the problem is also due to the last minute driver model changes that happened before
the Vista release ...

A creative example of the value of free drivers

nlucas — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:11:15 +0000

It seems to me no one has commented on the point that Daniel K was actually infringing
copyright law, which could probably be seen the same as taking a Linux Kernel, patch it with
some clever hack and distributing on a web server without the source code and also requesting
donations from this (but I'm not a lawyer).

While I find Creative response was simply stupid and out of proportion, they actually have the
law on their side, and is the same law we cherish as GPL users.

Anyway, I always disliked Creative for it's crappy drivers on Windows, even if the hardware
was ok (as a non-pro user).

Negotiating a worse contract

man_ls — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 06:27:51 +0000

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.

Creative's customers

giraffedata — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:55:37 +0000

Daniel_K, by making Creative's customers happier, was threatening Creative's chosen business strategy.

This is a misuse of the term "customer" that implies an irony, and business stupidity, that isn't there. The people in question are not customers. They are past customers, trying not to be current customers. No wonder Creative doesn't want them happy.

It's the same misnomer which often causes people to misapply the adage, "the customer is always right," thinking it means if someone goes into a business and demands something, the businessman should give it to him. What it really means is that if someone offers to buy something from you, and it's in your line of business, you should sell it to him (even if you think he shouldn't have it).

A creative example of the value of free drivers

giraffedata — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:50:06 +0000

I think the reason behind it is that Creative are not allowed to have their drivers opened up in this way because of their agreement with Microsoft and the DRM requirements of Vista.

But that's not what Creative said in its public reprimand of the modder, even though it would have been easier to defend than the property right issues that Creative apparently believes are at stake.

It's a common marketing practice

giraffedata — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:46:31 +0000

These days, even turning a screwdriver is pretty expensive, so this kind of price discrimination is done with cryptographic keys -- you pay your money and the vendor emails you a key that brings the dormant or underutilized hardware to life.

Sometimes you can downgrade again later too.

A creative example of the value of free drivers

giraffedata — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:29:36 +0000

Nor is it an example of software patents. Creative's strategy here is based on trade secrets and copyright.

Negotiating a better contract?

kevinbsmith — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:14:44 +0000

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

A creative example of the value of free drivers

fredds — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:11:39 +0000

I think the reason behind it is that Creative are not allowed to have their drivers opened up
in this way because of their agreement with Microsoft and the DRM requirements of Vista. Have
a look at this article, especially those parts relating to driver manufacturers.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.htm...

To me, Vista is no longer an operating system for users.

Pete

Other points.

man_ls — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:24:13 +0000

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.

It's a common marketing practice

gdt — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:46:25 +0000

IBM practiced this across their MVS mainframe range for many years. Their customers didn't feel too upset, as they were basically renting MIPS. At original sale IBM would ship bigger iron with some CPUs either clocked slow or disabled. Then the customer would pay more, a "screwdriver upgrade" would occur, and the customer would IPL (reboot) into a faster machine.

The benefit to the (typically banking and government) customer was simple. A mainframe "forklift upgrade" takes about two years of planning to minimise risk and disruption. An IPL takes about eight weeks of planning.

It's a common marketing practice

Cato — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:36:17 +0000

This is so common there's even a term for this: "mid-life kicker".  This applies both to doing
a product upgrade in middle of a product's lifespan (which is hardly controversial), and also,
I think, to the idea of "slugging" a product at launch and remove the "slug" for a fee when
doing the upgrade.

While this looks rather insane to some people, it is quite a sensible business practice - the
company can sell the initial product for a somewhat lower price maybe, and grow the market,
then release the faster/better product via upgrade without actually shipping new hardware to
existing customers.  Overall costs are lowered, and in a competitive market both the new and
old product should cost less than shipping an entirely "new" product.

Of course it does depend on customers not finding, or being unwilling to mess with, the
"slug"...

Drivers and 3rd-party vendor software bugs

pr1268 — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:39:57 +0000

When programs grovel into undocumented structures...

I know, I know! It's a MSDN blog page, but Raymond Chen's three anecdotes only seem to highlight the problem of how proprietary software lends itself to unreliability. Some of the back-door, sneaky techniques the ISVs pull off just to get their software working in Windows seem utterly surreal (C'mon, reaching up the stack? They're just begging for a segmentation fault or a blue screen!). I suppose NVIDIA's "bugs" are equally their blame as Microsoft's, because certainly it's behavior like that described on Chen's blog--relying on undocumented ABIs/APIs--that hardware companies and ISVs put in their Windows-based software.

Back to Creative, I personally think their PR and marketing staff should be shot for publicly blabbing that their sound cards were intentionally crippled just for Vista. Talk about driving prospective customers away en masse!

"Quality" is so meaningless...

walken — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:09:35 +0000

> 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.

Linux drivers

drag — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:12:37 +0000

Oh here is a interesting one:
http://lab0.wordpress.com/

Man, if anything this stuff can be very fun to play around with.

Linux drivers

drag — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:09:33 +0000

Probably not so much. 

the only thing I've realy done with audio in Linux is setup a cheap M-Audio Keystation and
learn to play a few songs. 

So while I know more then your average Linux user about audio stuff I have zero real world
experience, even as a amateur. Plus a lot of the stuff I know probably isn't really up to
date. I haven't kept up any.


What would be very cool though would be to get a hold of the folks behind 64studio or Ubuntu
Studio and get them to talk about real-world setups from people actually using Linux to
produce music. 

Hardware setups... software configuration, favorite software. Midi tools.. firewire or USB
accessories. Basement/bedroom studio setups, professional people using Linux. Challenges and
what they think could be done to make things better. What they would consider best place to
start for people doing simple recordings all the way up to trying to produce a album to stick
on myspace or anything in between.

That sort of thing.

Meanwhile there are places online that are worth keeping a eye on.http://www.linuxaudio.org/
for example. 

As far as I am concerned the level of quality and diversity of open source audio software
combined with the performance, stability, and affordability of Linux makes Linux Audio one of
the more disappointingly well kept secret s of Free software.

Linux drivers

drag — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:51:43 +0000

Ya. 

64Studio seems very good. 

The old DeMuDi distro from the Agnula project helped out tremendously to make things easier to
use. They put a lot of effort in packaging software and documenting things. I figure this is
why most audio processing applications and such are in Debian proper nowadays and is now be
re-incorporated into things like Studio64 and Ubuntu Studio. 

64Studio is probably the most mature things you can use as far as this sort of thing goes.
It's totally open source and compatible with Debian. It's also commercially oriented with
options for paid support and that happy stuff.

The cool thing is that they are seeming to gain some hardware vendor support. It started off
with Lionstrac's range of audio workstations and it looks like they picked up on a couple of
other vendors.
http://64studio.com/oem_products
http://eracks.com/products/Quiet%20Systems/config?sku=STUDIO

Creative has a rather long past; let's harass 'em for the right bits.

pizza — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:35:56 +0000

Creative's hardware should be classed into two categories -- pre-Live, and post-Live.  The
SBLive was revolutionary when it first came out, and managed to outlast the competition that
sprung up around the new 3D positional audio standards.  (They didn't kill Aureal when they
bought it; it was already a corpse by that point)

But, like so many other hardware markets, the integration of audio onto motherboards (starting
with the i810 chipset) all but killed the add-in sound market, taking it from a "everyone
needs to buy a basic sound card" to a luxury item for gamers and studio work.

The reasons for people having problems with the SBLive was that it was merely
PCI2.0-compliant; later revs of the PCI spec tightened some ambiguious stuff, and some
assumptions Creative made became out-of-spec, or close enough to the threshold that the
motherboard (and other add-in card) quality mattered.  

Well, that and finiky Win2K drivers, but that was hardly a problem unique to Creative Labs.

But if I were to consider buying a new sound card today, Creative's would be on the list to
evaluate; it's foolish to carry a prejudice based on a product two generations old.

"Quality" is so meaningless...

pizza — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:03:18 +0000

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.

Linux audio

vmole — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:33:48 +0000

So how is it supposed to know where to send sound in a multisystem setup? (Actually, PA supports avahi (zeroconf), so actually, I suppose it can automatically figure this stuff out. Never tried that, though.)

Or are you just objecting to text editors? PA has GUI config tools. They're still editing files, though. For that matter, so is GConf.

A creative example of the value of free drivers

mangoa01 — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:31:48 +0000

I would expect little else from Creative. I long ago decided that Creative hardware was
mediocre and its software horrible. The decision is easy. Stop buying it.

A creative example of the value of free drivers

ajross — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:45:54 +0000

Nor is this kind of behavior a recent invention, sadly.  The problem is endemic, and sad, but
not a great example of the collapse of society.

Other points.

leoc — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:29:58 +0000

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.

Linux audio

Frej — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:29:15 +0000

If editing files is needed, well that's the flaw number 1. ;)

It's a common marketing practice

iabervon — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:58:17 +0000

Usually, the base model doesn't use some of the lower-yield portions of the circuit that the
deluxe model uses, and they test boards and jumper only the ones that pass. Of course, then
their yield improves, and they need to take off the jumper to meet demand for the base model.
But there's often a reasonable chance that doing the upgrade on your own will reveal that the
thing won't actually work like that.

In any case, if the company is making a profit selling the deluxe hardware internals at the
base price, and this is able to compete with other manufacturers, having people find out that
they can turn the base model into the deluxe model is probably a net win. Of course, it's
usually not possible to make a profit making deluxe hardware and selling it at base model
prices.

Linux audio

vmole — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:40:02 +0000

I don't think PulseAudio is perfect, but as someone who has been struggling with audio-related Linux stuff since kernel 1.0.x, it's a lot closer than anything else. The config files are sane, and documented in a way non-experts can figure out. If all you need is single system audio on a single card, you probably don't even need to look at the config. Of course, PA still relies on ALSA, and ALSA has to keep up with all the crappy implementations of supposed standards like intel-hda.

It's a common marketing practice

mckay — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:03:40 +0000

A friend of mine told me that IBM did this with their 1130 minicomputers, back in the day. You
could purchase a "speed upgrade" that doubled the computer's speed. The "upgrade" consisted of
changing a jumper, which took a flip-flop out of the clock line.

Linux audio

Los__D — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:57:22 +0000

or make useless desktop bleeps

Hey, we NEED that bleep to tell us when the pagefile was expanded once again, and data might have been lost... Oh wait, wrong OS, carry on.

Linux audio

tialaramex — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:31:54 +0000

I don't agree with the contention that it's a mess and has "always been a mess" which suggests
that it's not got any better.

With OSS you had the abstraction in all the wrong places, so often there simply wasn't any way
to do what the user wanted, unless the user happened to want to do whatever the OSS designers
thought you should do (basically, play video games which use 16-bit stereo sound).

ALSA gets more of that right. There's a good chance that whatever my hardware is actually
capable of is reflected sensibly into userspace. I get dB relative amplifier settings for
example, instead of arbitrary "1-100" scales that could mean anything and frequently do.
Recent versions of ALSA finally default to "restore what you can" when your driver updates add
or remove some of the mixer controls for your hardware, which was a huge oversight in older
versions.

JACK gets a lot of stuff right that basically no-one had got right before, although other
modern operating systems are moving in the right direction.

In my experience even (Linux) distribution vendors have got a lot better about audio. Most of
them ship frameworks like JACK so that you don't need to compile anything yourself. They
usually make some attempt to properly set up your sound card, and to restore those settings
next time you use the computer. They will set the permissions correctly for the console user.
In some cases they even remember to grant the console user the new (non-dangerous) real time
quota so that he or she can use pro-audio software without editing text files.

However there's plenty more ground to be covered. Most of the heavy lifting now needs to be
done by the desktop environments (GNOME, KDE etc.), which have traditionally taken the 1990s
DOS game approach of pretending everyone owns a Soundblaster 16 and wants to either play
exactly one music file, or make useless desktop bleeps, or maybe, if they're feeling really
lucky, record a badly distorted or inaudibly quiet 8-bit version of their own voice saying
"Testing". The jury is still out on Pulseaudio, but all the previous attempts at this sort of
thing have been disastrous and I have no reason to think Pulseaudio's developers are any
smarter. JACK makes application developers actually have to care about audio - and that,
apparently, is unacceptable for anything except pro audio software. So, either Pulseaudio will
turn out to finally get this stuff right without making app developers think about it, or
we're back to just ALSA, which at least had dmix working on all the machines I own.

If you're using a properly configured laptop with a pro outboard card and a copy of Ardour
putting together a demo track you could imagine that Linux audio is fine now. But a phone call
from someone who is trying to make the "new mail" sound from Evolution audible - and has been
confronted by forty more or less identically labeled sliders which seem to do nothing - will
soon wake you up to a world where there's a lot left to do. Still, we're closer than we were a
few years ago.

Linux drivers

TxtEdMacs — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:35:43 +0000

Did you read deleteme comment that started this thread? If you could elaborate in a short
article, I would put it up on my site, gladly.  Or you might investigate doing a write up for
lwn.

Your knowledge of sound systems would be very useful to others here and off other sites.

[Check with Jon for my email address if you wish to humor my request.]

A creative example of the value of free drivers

peterhoeg — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:56:09 +0000

Creative is a Singaporean company so it can hardly be considered an indicator of how things
are going downhill in the US.

Linux drivers

tom.parkin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:51:19 +0000

Trouble is that it's just very hard to use. _Very_ hard to use for people not used to Linux.

I'm not sure that's true anymore. A few years ago I would have agreed with you, but now there are quite a number of audio-specific Linux distributions which appear very well put together.

As an example, I recently replaced the core of my home studio with a box running Ubuntu Studio, and was very pleased with how well it performed. With virtually no extra setup after installation I was able to sit down to a 6 hour recording session using Ardour with no issues. That's streaming 8 channels of 96KHz, 24bit audio with a 10ms latency. I certainly wouldn't say it was very hard.

Lawsuits might be pointed the other way

khim — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:21:44 +0000

I doubt they'd advertise a card as supporting exactly one version of Windows.

Why not? How is it different from supporting exactly one OS?

It's a common marketing practice

kbengston — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:11:00 +0000

There was a popular 80s multimeter brand that used the same internal circuit board for base
model and deluxe version. A single jumper enabled the upgrade. Of course the markings on the
outside of the case gave no clue that the extra features were available, but they were if you
knew. 

The manufacturer clearly thought that he could make a profit with either model, and that his
engineering costs would be minimised if the two used mostly identical hardware.  Was it legal
to enable the deluxe features that were dormant in the base model hardware that many paid for?
Most thought it was, though probably only a minority voided their warranty and actually did
it. The manufacturer had the good grace (and funds) to chalk it up to experience. He hasn't
repeated the mistake since.

Linux drivers

eru — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:56:40 +0000

What about multimedia-oriented distributions like 64studio? I assume they have the needed patches and software already in place. Of course people new to Linux are likely to hear about Red Hat, Ubuntu and other big distros first.

Linux drivers

drag — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:42:23 +0000

For audio processing on Windows the audio API is so poor that third party application
developers had to go and create their own driver models and APIs for audio processing on
Windows. It's called ASIO and even with Microsoft's dramatic changes for Vista people are
still going to need it.

This is one thing that Apple did right with OS X. Their Core audio stuff is very good.

Right now Linux's stuff works great. Alsa is able to provide ASIO performance,
realtime-preempt patches give Linux performance that exceeds every other OS out there. Jackd
allows you to route audio PCM and Midi signals between all sorts of hardware and software...
on fly and in a high performance manner. This allows you to use your favorite applications
(most serious audio apps support Jack) rather then a handful of small apps that conform to a
specific company's monolythic application. Alsa has the ability to use all sort of special
things... such as controlling audio output on a per channel basis, providing both software
mixing capabilities and direct access to hardware without requiring anything special.

All sorts of stuff. All the peices are there... People have been making good music using Linux
for a long time now. People have been running entire studios using Linux.

Trouble is that it's just very hard to use. _Very_ hard to use for people not used to Linux.
Hell most distros ship kernels with the "low-latency desktop" options completely disabled
(preemption and that sort of thing). People trying to use a server-style kernel that they are
given by default are going to generally get horrendous audio performance if they try to push
it (drop-outs, squeaks and pops introduced into audio recordings and playback due to buffer
underflows). So at a bare minimum it's going to require a kernel recompile for anything
remotely serious. Very serious stuff will require patching the kernel. (which often breaks
proprietary ATI and Nvidia drivers) How many music folks can handle that sort of thing? And
that is not even going into alsa configurations or learning the names of software so they can
find packages or (even worse) compile them one by one.

And, to make matters worse, both KDE and Gnome actually get in the way of doing this sort of
stuff. instead of making things easier they make them more difficult for end users to
understand what is going on. It's very fubar'd in terms of ease of use.

Plus Linux isn't 'sexy' for the sort of people that do amateur audio stuff. You can't get most
the hardware that magazines advertise to work on Linux. None of the 'industry standard'
software that advertises all over the place in music magazines works on Linux. When people see
videos and look at interviews of their favorite artists they see them using Apple hardware and
carrying around macbooks or messing around with impressive-looking things on XP. People will
quite happily go out of their way to spend thousands of dollars on software and equipment that
they think that the 'Pros' use.