Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

Despite the fact that Vista shipped 4 months and a day ago + the 5 years of development time, Creative has just now finally decided to do some work and ship what should hopefully be some quality non beta drivers. Granted this hasn't stopped some OEM's, like Dell, from shipping logo'd systems with Vista and XtremeMusic cards with beta Creative drivers (oh and these aren't even the latest beta drivers Creative made available)!

The new drivers can be found here (narrowed down to the XtremeMusic that I own, oh and if you have an Audigy 2, non beta drivers are available now as well):

The drivers download there supports the following audio devices only:

• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic,
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro

Oh and to just prove that Creative aren't a bunch of idiots and haven't been sitting on their hands all this time since Vista shipped:

Known issues:

• This driver does not support the following:
  • Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS™ signals
  • DVD-Audio
  • DirectSound®-based EAX games
  • 6.1 speaker mode.
• SPDIF passthrough is supported on Vista 32-bit only.
• Applications from the original Sound Blaster X-Fi CD will not work with this download.

Sure the entire bloody audio architecture in Vista changed, but there have been years of ramp up now. To release drivers this late and with a plethora of known issues that people care about, well, that's just unforgiveable. It's no wonder why you're losing the market and everyone just sticks with onboard AC'97 and now the far better HD Audio.

I've been running the beta drivers now on a 4.9 WEI system with my XtremeMusic and I can't even move a file from one folder to another without having WMP or VLC crackle and pop while playing music. All I can say is that unless this driver release or a new driver release in the next 90 days resolve this I will never buy a Creative product ever again.