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

[pfunkman]

That's one of those never ending discussions.

No its not. Whether its worth the cost difference is the never ending discussion. Whether an Xfi puts out higher quality sound than the alc888 chip is undeniable fact.

[4midable]

Too Late?

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

The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card driver for Linux from Creative Labs was awful. That's simply the nicest way to put it. The driver was home to many bugs, initially only supported 64-bit Linux, and it was arriving extremely late. The open-source drivers supporting the Creative X-Fi drivers have also been at a stand still. However, Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13083

Wow!!! really good to finally have the drivers on the way. The question I would ask is, how much good will have Creative lost by dragging the chain? For me, having had mine since 2006, I now have a full ONKYO system having left the other "out in the cold" and Creative with it. Like others I have moved on to Hi definition 1080p TV + sound, and a bad taste in the mouth.

[Vadi]

As as 64bit user who saw near-zero improvement on jave of 64bit even in the open-source version, I have to say, I'm not overly excited about this.

[The_Monkey_King]

I know we go all apes**t when a company develops MS drivers before Linux, if ever it does have a Linux driver. But there are two reasons for a company to behave this way: single set of rules for the largest platform (customer base), and relying on the kindness of strangers.

Think about it: a company has finite capital to spend on new product development as well as current product management (and of course, R&D). They are going to try to sell to as many customers using the lowest cost profile. Right now, that means MS. Yes, it supposed to have a standardized computing platform but each distro has its own set of gotchas and development cycles.

The second part is that Linux started out as alternative, user base driven type of system. yes, thoughts of profit probably were in there, but open source is completely different than for-profit camps.

So for a company to maximize profitability, why not go with the greatest user base and also see if anyone out there was willing to try create their own set of drivers as open source? By neglecting a user base that already goes off and does their own thing is probably not a hard choice. Also one other point: open source is not friendly to non-disclosure. You might think a company's hardware profile is not that exciting but to the company any amount of time they can enjoy market dominance beofre copy catting takes place, means more opportunity of running the market. As soon as everyone else catches on, then you have to ensure your R&D has the next latest and greatest ready to deliver and re-establish market dominance.


I hate it works this way. I have my own beef with ATI/AMD and wished they could deliver drivers that are as functional as their MS drivers at release time, instead of two years later.

Creative also pointed out in the forums that they have plans to continue to develop the drivers with help of the comunity, there are already a fix to their drivers with support for X-Fi Titanium, if you read the forums, creative is now actively taking notice of their drivers and the community, I suspect this interaction (as all open source interactions) will speed up the process of a working 5.1 full OpenAL driver.

[yogi_berra]

ATi gets away with it, because you can never really use the card to its full potential on Linux, cos there are no games or hardcore CAD apps.

- XSi
- Maya
- RealSoft 3D
- RealFlow
- VeriCAD


Yep, no hardcore 3D apps at all...

Sarcasm aside, the reason ATi now AMD is allowed to "get away" with less than stellar OpenGL support is because nVidia has awesome support and pretty much has the graphics workstation market sewn up even with all of the API breakage that the community throws at them

The real question should be however: Do we now have EAX under the GPL, or did they remove that before they relicensed it?

[EagleDM]

forget about the "conflicting licences" they just copy and paste the default licence of their private drivers on top of the free public driver, just read the GPLv2 inside the drivers, that's the one that matters.

Also, remember, this is the FIRST time ever creative launches a totally free open source driver in history.

Creative also pointed out in the forums that they have plans to continue to develop the drivers with help of the comunity, there are already a fix to their drivers with support for X-Fi Titanium, if you read the forums, creative is now actively taking notice of their drivers and the community, I suspect this interaction (as all open source interactions) will speed up the process of a working 5.1 full OpenAL driver.

I would say, it is very safe to buy a Creative X-Fi now, due to the way the drivers have taken from now on...

[Keefa]

Can I get _any_ sound with these drivers and the I/O console of Elite Pro?

[Thetargos]

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.

[MetalheadGautham]

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.

[EagleDM]

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.