Enter Daniel Kawakami (Daniel K). Driver modder. Working on his own, he modified the free version of ALchemy to work on Audigy series cards and also modified the Creative drivers themselves for Vista users to enable functionality that Creative said was impossible to reinstate. Creative Sound Blaster Audigy/Audigy2/Audigy4 Daniel_K Driver 2.15.0004EQ Windows Vista. Modified by Daniel Kawakami. Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Drivers v5.12.

Daniel_K, the Creative Labs fan who fixed the company's broken Vista sound card drivers, just e-mailed with his side of the story. 'My name is Daniel Kawakami and I'm Brazilian,' he writes. Motomaster eliminator battery booster pack with air compressor manual download. 'I'm NOT a cracker, a hacker, just an enthusiast modder with basic assembly knowledge and very persistent.' Kawakami's expertise allowed him to enable advanced features in sound cards that Creative advertised as Vista-compatible, but which did not perform as well under that operating system as they do under Windows XP. After tolerating the distribution of his unofficial drivers for a time, Creative's vice president of corporate communications, Phil O'Shaughnessy, ultimately asked him to stop, and accused him of '.' O'Shaughnessy also wrote that whether or not it cripples its Vista drivers is a 'business decision that only we have the right to make.' The rest of Kawakami's e-mail follows, verbatim, after the jump.

ALchemy It all started when Creative released the first beta of ALchemy for X-Fi cards, saying it used X-Fi's advanced capabilities (EAX5). After some investigation, I've found an EAX5.0 check and patched it. And it worked! Sometime later, they released the final version of ALchemy X-Fi and the paid version of ALchemy Audigy. I was realy mad at them, they didn't release a new Audigy driver and were charging Audigy owners for a software that runs on top of bugged drivers?

What is the point of that? Then I modified the X-Fi 'free' version of ALchemy, not the paid version. I did the same with the later versions, but when they released the 1.00.11, I couldn't patch it anymore. So I bought it, just for the sake of it. Well, I did manage to patch the latest version of ALchemy X-Fi to run on any card, without even removing Safecast, but I'm done with that.

The Audigy drivers They took several days, countless Vista reinstalls. Creative purposedly modified the Audigy drivers to disable some features when Vista is detected and also purposedly introduced some bugs to prevent some XP utilities from running. I did a complete analysis of the driver to determine where all the checks and bugs were introduced and started modding. Features that I've successfully enabled: - Dolby/DTS decoding (originally discovered by another Creative forum member, but I've explained how to use it) - CMSS, CMSS2 and Stereo Surround (originally only 'CMSS' was available, this setting also affects ALchemy/OpenAL, so it is really useful) - Advanced EQ and Special FX presets - DVD Audio - Hardware MIDI synthetizer (I wrote a small utility that automatically detects and changes the default Vista MIDI Synth during driver install or can change it later using its GUI.

Some media players lets you choose the MIDI synthesizer) - Equalizer (with preset saving, very hard to accomplish, had to deal with bugs in Creative software and use my creativity to find a workaround). - WaveRT (a Microsoft replacement for ASIO, however I don't know if it really works or not) The Live!/Live! 5.1 drivers Creative have always released UDA (Unified Driver Architeture) drivers. They purposedly ruined the Live! Support in Vista: 2.1 speakers setting resulted in distorted sound. After some investigation, I discovered the culprit module and replaced it with one from the last XP version and the problem was fixed.

In the later releases, Bass Management, Equalizer and EAX effects using software processing and Hardware MIDI support were added. There was also an ALchemy for Live! The X-Fi drivers I've added the following improvements: Hardware MIDI and WaveRT. I didn't have a X-Fi to test, so modding was then limited to these features. The Audigy LS/SE/Value/Live! 24-bit drivers Officially, they lack Bass Management, Equalizer and EAx effects, once available in XP drivers. I've found that the Audio Center utility (originally from the Vista Audigy Advanced MB drivers) worked just fine with these cards, so I made it available.