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Creative Gives In, They Open-Source Their X-Fi Driver

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  • #31
    Hourra ! Hourra ! Hourra !

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    • #32
      Originally posted by downhillgames View Post
      Quit your god damn trolling and go thread crap somewhere else, FOSStard.

      That's enough out of me.
      Wow, just wow...

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      • #33
        looks like some people can't get over "linuxhater stopped blogging" thing.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by Dragonlord View Post
          I wish you good luck touching no hardware with questionable Linux support if you wish to do high quality and high performance sound programming ( aka games ). If you only require a mediocre sound solution then there are many around but if you need something worth the trouble then simply saying "no" to such companies is a problem.

          It's not a problem at all, there are excellent alternatives for gaming and linux, such as the CMI 8788 based cards. The <3-5% performance drop is negligible if it exists at all.

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          • #35
            Best Drivers Ever!


            Just make and make install, reboot and that's it !!!

            First time I heard my beautiful X-Fi on Linux and I'm already mixing music and sound on Pulse Audio with 0 problems on Intrepid.

            Now if this guys figure out a way to output multichannel I will be more than happy

            I bought a Xonar DX just because X-Fi didn't have proper drivers, now I have both playing on Linux.

            Also, please, stop bitching about, Creative opensource the drivers, what more do you want, I know it's late, but there will be a lot of happy X-Fi owners out there with this release, Drivers are the most stable ever (comparing it to previous creative ones and OSS alternative) and are the easiest to install.


            Congrats Creative, this is the way to go, Now i have a really opensource system, Creative + ATI + Intel, now I need a better 2D driver for my 4870x2, i don't want to use fglrx

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            • #36
              Nice to see this happen and now the developer community can take this code and clean it up to produce a driver worthy of inclusion in the ALSA codebase. I am sure that any missing pieces can be quickly replaced. Creative should then thank the opensource community for helping them produce a robust driver for their cards.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by deanjo View Post
                It's not a problem at all, there are excellent alternatives for gaming and linux, such as the CMI 8788 based cards. The <3-5% performance drop is negligible if it exists at all.
                You know that was not his point right?

                If you don't: his point was that if you would turn down all software/hardware developers that have turned Linux a cold shoulder at some point in time, you would end up having almost nothing to run Linux on.

                Also, more importantly, there is no room for all the haters. Every new piece of open sourced hardware/software is a small victory for Linux, as it is then possible to give better support for it, which makes it more efficient/user friendly, which could lead to a better OS and a bigger market share. So instead bitching, we are better served with applauding every new developer that open sources it's product.

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                • #38
                  Gaming with a software rendering soundcard is not so happy flowers, for example I have both, xonar DX and X-Fi in both vista an ubuntu, if you compare them under Vista, the EAX and 3D positional audio in the Xonar Drivers is a joke compared to creative, that's the sad truth, you cannot play any game, the majority will play in plain stereo.

                  Listening to music is another thing completly, Xonar far surpasses X-Fi quality.

                  If X-Fi drivers comes with hardware accelerated mixing, remember that X-fi is a very powerful chip and can render 3D posicional voices in stereo up to 128 at the same time without ANY CPU cycles used and has ver good quality at it so, give it time, now we have opensource drivers so, creative is not our enemy anymore in linux, and, after 4 hours of listening music with this new driver I can safely say that it sounds BEAUTIFUL compared to the Xonar, even in Linux, Creative did a good job tunning the internal filters for optimal quality, the only thing that is left to do is implement multichannel.

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                  • #39
                    Does this mean its safe to buy a Xi-Fi card now ?

                    I am thinking of a basic card since I use my PC as a guitar AMP with GNUitar and Jack Rack.

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                    • #40
                      I actually have always respected Creative for the quality of their hardware. When the Live! drivers were released circa 2000, and the specs were share I was very excited and respectful of Creative. They since produced the Audigy which required only minor adjustments in the drivers and then the Audigy 2 sound cards (based virtually on the same engine as the Live, but improved with the EMU10K2 chip), however Creative did not release much documentation for the Audigy series of cards (so no 24-bit output, no 96KHz support, etc. Then came the X-Fi and Linux support was ditched for Vista support (support which in opinion of many Creative X-Fi owners was sucky at best). Creative has struggled to even on the Windows market due to several problems plaguing their drivers on Vista (flaky OpenAL support, ALchemy not working right all the time, etc). When they first released the drivers on Linux I dreamed about EAX on Linux, and we do have that to some extent (at least being able to program the DSP with 10K1 assembly for different effects), but there is no way of controlling this programatically through a coherent API (like EAX) on Linux (not that it couldn't be written... but may be it wouldn't be used as much as on Windows); but we don't have EAX as such... Now with this release from Creative, I wonder if they will actually work with the community for having some sort of OpenAL+EAX hardware backend for their hardware-acceleration capable hardware (Live! - X-Fi).

                      I have bought and recommended Creative hardware (Emu10K*) on Linux for one reason: Feature support. They are/were about the only audio cards whose features were virtually all supported (with some notable exceptions like THX and DolbyDigital/DTS, due to third party lack of support). Other than that: Hardware mixing, digital input/output, multichannel output/input, etc. I wasn't planning on buying an X-Fi card, to tall the truth, nor I ever felt that I needed something greater than my Live! for my audio needs. But when people asked, that was what I recommended, and still do...

                      Now, since deanjo pointed it out, there seems to be two contradicting licenses there, one from the website and one from the code itself, the code seems to be GPLv2, but the website states other terms of use and license, which prevent the code to be fully GPLv2 compliant... what gives? At any rate, I hope these drivers mature enough in time, and by ALSA 1.0.19 become part of the normal driver stack.

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