I was thinking the same things:
Midi music using soundfonts
Haven't concluded that topic yet...

HunterZ wrote:

I'll never put a modern Creative card in any of my computers, both on principle and to avoid driver and/or hardware problems.

The X-Fi does have a nice mixer feature called the "Crystalizer" which beefs up the general sound quality of lacklustre MP3 audio. IMHO.

The X-Fi chip's greatest aspect may be its headphone output capabilities IMO. It does very impressive conversion of 3D audio. Audigy has some of the same capabilities, but they do even more with X-Fi.

Crystalizer is interesting, but I've been doing audio processing like that with Winamp plugins since forever....

swaaye wrote:

Oh dear. Yeah I hear you somewhat. I don't have problems with their drivers and haven't since they figured out NT5. But their business practices are some of the scuzziest out there.

Creative is a sore spot for me. To boil it down, ever since Creative entered the PCI sound card market they've basically been trying to maintain their weakening stranglehold on the PC audio market by way of marketing and corporate strong-arming instead of technical innovation and customer support. I progressively lost respect for them over time (from the mid-90s to the early-00s) until I finally swore them off 5+ years ago, and since then I haven't once felt like I was missing out on anything but potential frustration by not having a Creative sound card in my systems.

I tend to get great deals on these cards. Crazy rebates. I have picked them up when they were no longer the hottest tech in town and they were cheap. You can find really cheap Audigy 1/2/4 cards on ebay these days and IMO they are amazing DOSBOX choices and certainly useful for recent games and music too. Creative isn't winning when you get a $10 Audigy off ebay!!!!

Fortunately for me and unfortunately for Creative, my primary computer is currently a laptop and my next computer will have my excellent Asus Xonar DX PCIe sound card moved to it.

retro games 100 wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

I'll never put a modern Creative card in any of my computers, both on principle and to avoid driver and/or hardware problems.

The X-Fi does have a nice mixer feature called the "Crystalizer" which beefs up the general sound quality of lacklustre MP3 audio. IMHO.

I don't listen to MP3s much, so that always struck me as mostly another Creative marketing gimmick.

swaaye wrote:

The X-Fi chip's greatest aspect may be its headphone output capabilities IMO. It does very impressive conversion of 3D audio. Audigy has some of the same capabilities, but they do even more with X-Fi.

Crystalizer is interesting, but I've been doing audio processing like that with Winamp plugins since forever....

Neither feature makes up for the embarrassing lack of DDL/DTS encoding. I think Creative hates to license things to the point that they either buy out the company that owns a technology or don't use it at all. It took Auzentech making hybrid cards with both Creative and DDL/DTS encoding chips to come up with a decent solution.

I'd rather just cut out the Creative part though, which is why I bought a Xonar DX. A lot of the hardware sites are now pushing Xonar cards in their system building guides I've noticed.

I could write a much longer anti-Creative diatribe (I didn't even mention on-board 5.1 sound becoming viable for the vast majority of PC gamers, the waning of EAX, the irrelevance of hardware-accelerated sound processing in modern PCs, or the issue of modern PC games mostly being console ports), but I'll spare you all for now 😜

I actually have a X-Fi running 5.1 analog output to a receiver. Aside from the annoying wires, which are only annoying during the initial hookup anyway, it's probably superior to lossy DDL. I've used Soundstorm DDL and while it was neat, and the only way to get HQ audio from that solution, NVIDIA's drivers were really rather buggy with some games (shocking I know). Soundstorm was just another ROI direction for NVIDIA's Xbox R&D anyway.

I'm sure Creative's lack of desire to utilize DDL is a combination of avoidance of licensing costs and also competitiveness. Companies don't like to show support for other companies, especially if they are even slightly competing. See ATI & NVIDIA and CUDA, for example. Or Intel and 3DNow! Or MS and OpenGL/MPEG2/AC3 (finally with Vista we got DVD built-in). Lots of examples. And there is also the issue of just how much it is really worth to the end user and whether it's worth added cost to every single card they sell. Business decisions, eh. Yeah they suck for us.

The only thing that has really bothered me about Creative are their attempts at forced obsolescence. But frankly I can see the reasoning there too. Supporting a product for eternity for free with new software is not something you'll see in very many parts of the computing industry. Or any other industry for that matter. They have actually supported their sound cards longer than most (all?) other sound card companies that I'm aware of.

And yeah their litigation nonsense has been ugly, but it's certainly not unique to them. Their competitors didn't die specifically due to it. The sound card market is a sad little low-volume niche. That's partly why Creative has diversified like crazy. They surely would have folded if all they sold were sound cards. The onboard audio option is what almost everyone goes for.

With regards to their supposed lack of innovation, well other companies are now licensing those X-Fi chips for their own high-priced elite sound cards. I think that says something.

swaaye wrote:

I actually have a X-Fi running 5.1 analog output to a receiver. Aside from the annoying wires, which are only annoying during the initial hookup anyway, it's probably superior to lossy DDL.

For me there's no purpose in using anything but on-board sound if all you care about is analog 5.1. I bought my Xonar DX mainly because I already had Logitech Z-5500d speakers and wanted to use its digital inputs and still have 5.1 sound in games over that connection.

I should mention that the Xonar cards are supposed to be competitive with the Creative/Auzentech cards for analog, too, though, if you care about getting better analog fidelity than what an on-board solution typically provides.

And yeah their litigation nonsense has been ugly, but it's certainly not unique to them.

Not an excuse, and certainly not something that would help me sleep at night after buying their products 🤣.

I've already decided to buy an ATI video card instead of nVidia for my next desktop partly because they've started to take cues from Creative's playbook (which is ironic considering that nVidia beat 3dfx because 3dfx had fallen into the same trap at the time!).

Their competitors didn't die specifically due to it.

So what, in your opinion, killed Aureal then? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal

The sound card market is a sad little low-volume niche. That's partly why Creative has diversified like crazy. They surely would have folded if all they sold were sound cards. The onboard audio option is what almost everyone goes for.

Yes, but the sound card market wasn't low-volume until on-board actually became a viable option around a half-dozen years ago. Creative tried to use strong-arming to stop that too, partly by buying out Sensaura since almost all non-Creative sound solutions were using Sensaura tech for 3D sound - including most famously nVidia's SoundStorm chipset, which was the first solution I know of to bring DDL to the PC, and which nVidia dropped from the nForce boards at exactly the same time that Creative bought Sensaura.

With regards to their supposed lack of innovation, well other companies are now licensing those X-Fi chips for their own high-priced elite sound cards so I think that says something.

By licensing out their chips they can do things like letting other card makers bear the cost of licensing technologies like DDL that Creative is unwilling to invest in (since they can't buy out Dolby), which lets them keep a market presence without having to do any end-user technical support themselves. It's definitely smart for them, but it doesn't change the fact that they're still just coasting on a stale, eroding brand name at the same time that the aftermarket PC sound hardware market is evaporating.

I don't know what killed Aureal, and I don't think anyone else does either outside of their ex-management. I do know that Aureal was founded off of MediaVision people and that MV had corruption going on. I wouldn't be surprised if the main reason for their dissolution was the oncoming onslaught of onboard audio which was happening at around that time. They weren't the first or last sound card company to disappear around the end of the '90s.

Yes, but the sound card market wasn't low-volume until on-board actually became a viable option around a half-dozen years ago. Creative tried to use strong-arming to stop that too, partly by buying out Sensaura since almost all non-Creative sound solutions were using Sensaura tech for 3D sound - including most famously nVidia's SoundStorm chipset, which was the first solution I know of to bring DDL to the PC, and which nVidia dropped from the nForce boards at exactly the same time that Creative bought Sensaura.

i810 brought in onboard audio in a big way in 1999. That's when I remember sound cards vanishing from PCs en masse. VIA had southbridges with onboard too at that time. Don't recall what SiS had. Prior to that you had a mix of strange generic cards and low-cost reworks from some of the big players. Razor thin margins, I imagine.

I think the only reason that Soundstorm existed was as a way to make some more money off of the Xbox technology. It was the same DSP. It wasn't developed for the PC market at all, other than some half-assed drivers. And I'm pretty confident that it failed to sell well because few people cared to pay for it instead of basic AC97. It wasn't used on that many boards and I'm not sure it was ever used on a big box PC line. AMD was definitely the hardware choice for budget PC lines back then too so I would imagine not.

The purchase of Sensaura was a smart strategic move, don't ya think? Regardless of it's "evilness". 😀 If NVIDIA had cared, they could have bought Sensaura. But obviously they didn't care very much.

I'm not saying Creative isn't smart in terms of corporate strategy - quite the opposite in fact.

Also, Wikipedia and other sources clearly state that Aureal died because Creative litigated them into the ground and then scooped up their ashes into a garbage bag despite the fact that Aureal won.

gerwin wrote:

I always read the Wave Blaster II, which actually has 2MB, was considered an improvement over its predecessor.

My mistake (the old memory ain't what it used ot be <G>)... yep, the WB2 had a 2MG ROM. But, the WB1 had a 4MB ROM, and being that is was based on a Proteous (verses the WB2 which had the (at the time) new EMU8K), it sounded MUCH better than the newer WB2.

As far general SoundFont stuff, my current rig has an SBLive! with a custom 35MB SoundFont of mine... quite impressive sounding <IMHO> 😀 That's what I do all of my (de)composing on now <G>.

rfnagel wrote:

As far general SoundFont stuff, my current rig has an SBLive! with a custom 35MB SoundFont of mine... quite impressive sounding <IMHO> 😀 That's what I do all of my (de)composing on now <G>.

If you haven't yet, you definitely should try out the kx drivers. Makes Live rather amazing even today.
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?language=en

My mistake (the old memory ain't what it used ot be <G>)... yep, the WB2 had a 2MG ROM. But, the WB1 had a 4MB ROM, and being that is was based on a Proteous (verses the WB2 which had the (at the time) new EMU8K), it sounded MUCH better than the newer WB2.

I didn't know that WaveBlaster 1 was that good. I've never heard either of the versions.

HunterZ wrote:

....Wikipedia and other sources clearly state that Aureal died because Creative litigated them into the ground....

That was the popular claim at the time. And it was indeed said to be the cause by an Aureal exec. But look at these financials. They were in the red for a long time (forever?). I think the suit just broke them a little quicker than otherwise was going to happen anyway.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=OTC:AURLQ&fstype=ii

Things aren't looking so hot over at Creative. 😀
http://www.google.com/finance?q=OTC:CREAF&fstype=ii

You could say the same happened with 3dfx. There were lots of problems over there beyond NV suing them but throwing that extra money away quickened things along heh.

swaaye wrote:

If you haven't yet, you definitely should try out the kx drivers. Makes Live rather amazing even today.

Thanks for the heads-up. I've heard of the KX drivers, but never really paid any attention to them before. Will now though, thanks for the link 😀

swaaye wrote:

I didn't know that WaveBlaster 1 was that good. I've never heard either of the versions.

Quite honestly, I've always that it sounded better than the (at the time) comparable Roland card (can't remember now, what was it, a "DBX-50"?). Of course, the old Proteous MIDI synths/modules are quite oboslete now (which the WB1 was based upon), but in their day they were quite impressive sounding.

rfnagel wrote:

Thanks for the heads-up. I've heard of the KX drivers, but never really paid any attention to them before. Will now though, thanks for the link 😀

They are great. One of the best aspects to them is that they allow you to use the rear output as the front, and this is good because the rear output is higher quality.

Also, their abstracted DSP that's is modeled around a programmable visual design language is very powerful. They include a slew of drop-in functions and you can make your own if you are so inclined. I usually just set up the included 10-band EQ. That's more EQ than anything from Creative below X-Fi allows. It does eat up a lot of Live!'s DSP registers though so you can't do much more if you want to use that EQ.

rfnagel wrote:

Quite honestly, I've always that it sounded better than the (at the time) comparable Roland card (can't remember now, what was it, a "DBX-50"?).

Hmm, I'm not sure but I think that the only options for DBs were the SCD-10 and SCD-15 and those were effectively identical for gaming. The SCC-1 was the full card version and equivalent to SCD-15.

From what I've heard from my SCD-15, I'd say that they are overrated a bit. I like the sound of the Ensoniq Soundscape Elite somewhat more. But really with a good soundfont you can completely blow away all of those old cards. A good argument for the Roland cards however is that the game's composer probably used one when he was creating the music so it's very authentic.

swaaye wrote:

If you haven't yet, you definitely should try out the kx drivers. Makes Live rather amazing even today.
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?language=en

The kX project drivers are really neat, I used them about 5-6 years ago with my SBLive. I like how they actually let you "wire" the internals of the card.

Edit: Here's how I had kX hooked up at one point: http://www.geocities.com/mirat_beryn/hunterzdsp.html

You could say the same happened with 3dfx. There were lots of problems over there beyond NV suing them but throwing that extra money away quickened things along heh.

One of 3dfx's major missteps was to cling to Glide for too long in an attempt to lock developers into supporting only their hardware. Creative tried the same thing for a long time with EAX and now (ironically) nVidia is being heavily scrutinized in the online hardware news for attempting to do the same thing with PhysX.

swaaye wrote:

They are great. One of the best aspects to them is that they allow you to use the rear output as the front, and this is good because the rear output is higher quality.

Hmmm... I didn't know that. I'll have to read up on that a bit more. The EMU8K/AWE-32 cards I'm pretty much 'well versed' in, but the SBLive! stuff is relatively new to me.

swaaye wrote:

Also, their abstracted DSP that's is modeled around a programmable visual design language is very powerful. They include a slew of drop-in functions and you can make your own if you are so inclined. I usually just set up the included 10-band EQ. That's more EQ than anything from Creative below X-Fi allows. It does eat up a lot of Live!'s DSP registers though so you can't do much more if you want to use that EQ.

Thanks for the info. Looking at your attached pics, I'm sure that I'll have to give those drivers a try now... I LOVE new things to play around with <G> 😀

swaaye wrote:

But really with a good soundfont you can completely blow away all of those old cards.

Agreed 100%. I have quite a few retail soundfont CDs, and throughout the years ended up creating my own custom GM compatable soundfont (~36MB) that I do most of my composing with. Every now and then though, I'll fire up the old 486 and DOOM just to hear how the old WB1 sounded... just for sentimental purposes <G> 😀

BTW, almost forgot, some of my meager offerings here -> http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/SoundFonts/ ... one of these days I'll get off of my butt and upload that big custom soundfont of mine (procrastinating, as I'm on a miserable lowly dialup connection).

HunterZ wrote:

Edit: Here's how I had kX hooked up at one point: http://www.geocities.com/mirat_beryn/hunterzdsp.html

!!!!! 😀

rfnagel wrote:

http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/SoundFonts/

Interesting....

swaaye wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

Edit: Here's how I had kX hooked up at one point: http://www.geocities.com/mirat_beryn/hunterzdsp.html

!!!!! 😀

Hehe. I was trying to do several things:

- Downmix from 5.1 to 4.0, since I was using a makeshift 4.0 speaker setup at the time.
- Use Dolby ProLogic-like decoding on the stereo WaveOut stream.
- Add some Reverb and Chorus effects to the MIDI stream.

A lot of the widgets there are just crossfading mixers so I could control how much of each input was being mixed in at each stage.

The best part was that a lot of games used WaveOut for the cinematics but DirectSound for the in-game sounds, so I would get Dolby surround sound cinematics alongside 3D positional sound effects. The downside was that there was no EAX and there were some DirectSound3D quirks (Halo for example was missing several sound channels with kX).

rfnagel wrote:

http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/SoundFonts/

DOOM2Sfx.zip seems to be broken.

aleksej wrote:

rfnagel wrote:

http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/SoundFonts/

DOOM2Sfx.zip seems to be broken.

I had a reply on another message board with the same. Are you using 7-Zip to unzip the file? Try the older PKUNZIP for DOS (or the newer PKUNZIP for Windows; GUI or command line versions), the internal file unzipper of Windows XP, the built-in unzipper of Total Commander (a.k.a. Windows Commander), or WinZip... they work just fine 😀

The problem is that 7-Zip doesn't support some of the features that the afore-mentioned ones do. I embed a digital certificate in all of my (more recent) ZIPs, and this feature was initally introduced with PKWare's "SecureZIP" utilities quite a few years ago. Most unzipper programs added support for unzipping these types of things, but unfortunately 7-Zip hasn't yet (quite strange though, as the ancient PKUNZIP for DOS - circa 1999 - works just fine).

rfnagel, no, i was tried WinRAR for it first time but yeah, very strange, authentic ZIP unpackers and Total Commander unpack it just fine.

aleksej wrote:

rfnagel, no, i was tried WinRAR for it first time but yeah, very strange, authentic ZIP unpackers and Total Commander unpack it just fine.

Ahhh, thanks for the info. I'll add WinRAR to my list, for future reference of ones that don't work.