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Creative Labs to open SB Live Drivers 139

Posted by Hemos from the good-sound-for-everyone dept.
Several people wrote to us to let us know that Creative Labs has decided to make the drivers for their Soundblaster Live open source. They made the announcement and also said they will be setting up a CVS/Bugzilla system to aid in development. Jon Taylor, of S3 and nVidia fame, along with several other coders have been asked to oversee the development. Additionally, they confirmed that they are working with Lokisoft to work Environmental Audio and "3D Audio" on the Linux platform. Lokisoft makes most of the uber-cool games for Linux.
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Creative Labs to open SB Live Drivers More

Creative Labs to open SB Live Drivers

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  • Major Significance for Open Source SB Live Drivers (Score:4)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @05:16AM (#1575766) Homepage
    Alot of people aren't going to get the significance of this announcement--they'll think, "Cool, another sound card that I can play with on Linux w/o resorting to closed source drivers."
    This is beyond that.
    The SB Live is based on a single, ridiculously powerful and extremely programmable DSP. Almost all functions the chipset performs are executed in DSP level software, meaning suddenly Linux is getting full specs on a complete digital processing environment.
    The impacts of this are substantial. The SB Live chipset is cheap enough that it's a contender for "standard sound" in many machines. Open source algorithms for everything from MP3 encoding to analog synth simulation to the more esoteric, non-sound related stuff(GIMP graphical filters, datastream analysis, etc.) should, if the drivers are clean enough, start popping up over time.
    The uses of such a powerful digital signal processor on an open platform are honestly unpredictable at this point in time. While there are hardcoded design issues in the SB Live chipset(most notably, all signals are upsampled to 48khz before processing may occur), the sheer flexibility of this chipset will blow Linux programmers out of the water.
    This is truly excellent news, and shouldn't be ignored as a mere fun thing for the gamers to play with. If only 3D graphics hardware was as programmable...or as open.
    Yours Truly,
    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • I've been thinking (a dangerous thing indeed) that perhaps the reason for Creative adopting open source is the fact that it simply isn't in their best interest to have dedicated Linux coders working on the drivers. In the long run, it could be cheaper for them to open the design rather than pay someone to write drivers for an OS which is still only used by a small fraction of their customers. (Although a very vocal fraction.)

    It does make sense, Creative gets the work done for free, and they'll get QA on it to boot. Economically, it makes perfect sense, and it's an all-around good decision. This is a good case to use in citing why Open Source is a Good Thing(tm). Look like the Live! will win over a lot of people who wouldn't have bought it before now.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Use any PCL3 driver. The printer will still work. The printer specific drivers for windows are usually just a different picture so the user sees the printer they bought on the screen.

    If you ever have driver trouble with a HP Laser, select LaserJet 4 - always works because it's straight PCL 5, no extra crap.
  • ...for soundcards, at least.

    It's pretty short, too.

    http://www.alsa-project.org/black.html

  • Creative: Doing it right, for profit (Score:5)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @05:27AM (#1575771) Homepage
    A bit more thought on this:
    Wow, creative is setting up CVS/Bugzilla. They're not merely opening the source; they're not just trying to grasp a bit of extra PR out of the Linux mindshare gods(Taco and Hemos :-). They're actually going the extra mile and providing not only the source but a development environment for coders to come, watch, and learn.
    This is amazing, and deserves a retrospective profile in around six months to see how this great, precedent setting experiment panned out.
    Of course, Creative isn't dumb. As I mentioned in another post, Creative stands to have their card become the standard DSP component in innumerable Linux machines--their foresight in developing a programmable sound card is very likely to pay off handsomely in increased sales.
    The economics of Open Source [doxpara.com] just got much more interesting.
    Yours Truly,
    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • I fully agree on this matter! Emailing the manufacturer, especially their software design department, works! Also putting up a site will draw the attention of the software developers and the people responsable.

    Check some of my correspondence: Europe developer support [euronet.nl] and US developer support [euronet.nl]
    The amount of people that do this, is also important and remember, look at things from their perspective when emailing. Things like this, will eventual frustrate them and make 'm think...
    Manuël Beunder, maintainer of The SB Live! Linux page [euronet.nl]

    ps, I also forgot to mention that releasing a GPL-ed source, means they support GPL, making it also possible for ALSA to start working again on the drivers...
  • Even more sound support for linux. This might just make me go out and buy an SBLive.

  • If im not mistaken this is a "winprinter" right? this may fall under the same realm as winmodems. Of course I could be totally wrong. Just a thought
    "We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
  • [OFF-TOPIC]

    This is excellent news.

    However, I'm not entirely happy with the assertion that Lokisoft makes 'most of the uber-cool games' for Linux! This article was about how cool it is that Creative are open-sourcing their SBLive drivers. And it is very cool. So remember, that Loki don't make open source games.

    Now, I do of course understand why they don't. And I do think Loki is a very exciting company, and they're doing exciting things for Linux, and I'm sure it won't be all that long before we see some more open source offerings from Loki.

    But, I'd just like to remind people that there are some excellent open source games for Linux. My personal fave has to be FreeCiv - http://www.freeciv.org/ [freeciv.org] - and pingus will be excellent when it goes 1.0 - http://pingus.seul.org/ [seul.org]

    For many other superb linux games, many of them open source, pop over to http://happypenguin.org/ [happypenguin.org]

    Jules

  • Re: finally (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hi there. I'm not saying buy this instead of SB Live. If you are interested in going to a local store and hear a Trident 4DWave DX/NX, I found a list of international distributors at http://www.hoontech.com/main2.html click Products :-) :: Sound Track Digital NX ( Supports Optical OUT, Digital AMP ) BTW there is already driver for Linux with source under GPL license, for this chipset by Trident 4DWave DX/NX. Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - Supported SoundCards: http://www.alsa-project.org/src/soundcards.html if you'd like to know more about ALSA go to http://www.alsa-project.org then read by clicking introduction, applications, bug reporting, download, documentation ,api, mailing lists
  • The comcept of having custom dsp algoritms would rock very much, but I dont think its gonna happen. Creative will probable ship the DSP-code as a binary as many users have stated before, and this is logical, because they probably dont want to "give away" the sourcecode of their nice reverbs and stuff, even if its quite dependant of the EM10K1 dsp, it could surely be rewritten to use on other processors..

    But I really hope Im wrong, and there could be other possibilities too, that they provide their algorithms as precompiled libraries or something but keeping other parts of the DSP code open..
  • This is awesome, I thought I was going to have to sell my SBLive or something. This rocks, it isn't just another soundcard. Finally, great midi under linux (?)

    This is truly great news ... I can't wait for mature drivers and software for this thing. CL might be cool after all. This might just turn out to be the most popular sound card of all time.

  • This isn't just a Linux win. (Score:4)

    by Brandon Hume ( 73471 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @06:14AM (#1575779) Homepage
    Let's try to remember that Linux isn't the only OS that will gain from this step by Creative. The *BSDs, Solaris, and more will all win. And not just x86 architectures... PCI-based SPARCs, Alphas, and PowerPCs, which Creative never considered "cost effective" to develop drivers for, will finally have an option aside from the horrid on-board sound.

    I'm endlessly pleased by this. Now, to work on them to release specs for their DXR decoders and the like. (Give an inch, take a mile. :) )
    --
    Brandon Hume
    hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
  • that they're now opening their top of the line hardware drivers too.
  • now if other company's followed their example. we would be going in the right direction.
    ---
  • Hopefully this will inspire vortex to release code for their A3D chipset, instead of having to pay OSS for a driver

  • AUGGHH (Score:1)

    by g33k ( 34493 )
    I just sold my SB live. why couldn't they have done this from the start?

  • Ding-dong A3D (Score:3)

    by Hobbex ( 41473 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @02:30AM (#1575786)

    Yay, this makes me even more happy that I chose a soundcard by A3D, hoping to support competition rather than the market leader, when I bought my computer way back when. A year later, and now those who chose SB Live's have a opensource drivers, and what do I have? A $30 closed source (crippled and buggy) solution from Opensound, and Aureal support claiming they might have drivers out "towards the end of 1999" (though they also claim they will be "more open-source" whatever that means).

    Never the less, I am not bitter. It's great that Creative are seeing the light here, and I hope that more companies (cough, cough) could follow in their footsteps. It just feels so wrong that the only way to get good sound support in Linux is to support a huge company with a defacto monopoly in this area. That was sort of what I was trying to get away from...

    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.

  • It makes sense. Now they see the sense. (Score:4)

    by Nerant ( 71826 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @02:31AM (#1575787)
    I recall reading in one of ESR's essays that the release of driver source code is a logical and beneficial step for hardware manufacturers: they benefit from having the open source community to working on it, while effectively broadening the range of operating systems their hardware can run on. Hopefully, other hardware manufacturers will emulate Creative in this move towards open source. The point is, hardware companies generally don't make money from their drivers: they make money from pushing their hardware for sale to you, the consumer. I foresee that more Linux users will want an SBLive! now. =)

    my 2 cents.

  • Sounds good but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...when will Linux get a decent, uniform, games API? DirectX (But done properly ;) )for Linux would, of course, be useful...
  • its great that Creative has released these drivers, but the coolest part of the announcement is the possibility of the creation of some sort of universal sound API out of the Loki/Creative collaboration...

    it would definitely be nice to have sound programming be as easy to use as network programming...

    We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
  • I think your totally wrong. ;-) Using the same logic, you could say all hardware is "Winthis" or "Winthat." Just because it comes with a Wndows driver and not a Linux one does not mean it is a "Winanything".

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • But we can always program our own reverb algorithms. Already, the Turtle Beach Fiji/Pinnacle cards have a Motorola 56001, fully programmable under Linux. See Sound & MIDI Software For Linux [bright.net] for details.


    I'm sceptical though towards seeing sound card DSPs used in general data processing. Isn't the data path too slow? It's only 48000 kHz * 2 channels * 2 bytes/channel = 192kbps. For example, mp3 encoders such as LAME are already a lot faster than this on fast PII/III's. And on the Athlon, doubly so.
  • I'm using slackware with kernel 2.2.12, if u just force the insertion of the module, it will work even though it says wrong kernel version. It's working fine and so far nothing bad has happened.


    _______________________________________________
    There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.
  • I totally agree. Just yesterday I talked with the Creative staff regarding the possibility to free their code so that we could have this ported to (in my case) FreeBSD and other systems as well. I think this is to be concidered as a yes. :)

  • It's probably not really open. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sorry to spoil the party, but don't get overexcited.
    They say in the announcement, there are two sets of drivers, one open source and one BINARY ONLY.
    The FAQ has the same information, and suggests that the open source driver will only be a loader for the binary only module to avoid recompiling the kernel.
    So it seems that we have a lion in sheeps disguise.
    Also, if the free loader is GPL'ed, you must not redistribute the driver, because you can't provide the source for the binary only module. Sorry guys, I am suspicious until I see the full details.
  • Is this under the GPL or BSD license or something else?
  • >48000 kHz * 2 channels * 2 bytes/channel = 192kbps

    Oh no, not again. Ignore the logical errors in previous post.
    What I meant was 48kHz * 2 * 2 = 192 kilobytes/s.
    But it's still slow in mp3 coding, since the input stream cannot be faster that real time.
  • um... be careful with insmod -f ... bypasses a lot of sanity checks and could hang your system or worse, depending on the module used.

  • Re:Creative is getting cooler in my book (Score:5)

    by Fizgig ( 16368 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @06:59AM (#1575799)
    I will never doubt an AC again. I thought you were lying, but after about 5 minutes I came up with this!!!!!!!


    OK, I guess the cat is out of the bag now. Like the article says,
    Creative is opening the sources to the existing SBLive (Emu10K1,
    technically) Linux kernel driver. The current sourcebase is what would
    have been release as beta4 of the driver, with 4-speaker support (stereo
    mirroring only at present) and SPDIF output being the main changes from
    beta3. Also being released are beta sources for a DXR2 driver which
    were donated to Creative by Andrew de Quincey (thanks, Andrew!). The
    source for both projects will be released under the GPL. We are
    planning to submit kernel patches as soon as possible, after the
    open-source development community has had a chance to beat on the driver
    sources for a bit and whip them into shape.

    Also as the article mentioned, Creative is going to launch an
    open-source development support site with FAQs, CVS repositiories,
    CVSWeb tracking, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and all the other standard
    open source project website services. The site will be up and running
    sometime early next week - PLEASE do not overload
    developer.soundblaster.com with repeated checks to see if the site is up
    yet, OK? We'll announce loud and clear when the server goes live.

    So, that's where things stand as of Friday evening. All of us here at
    Creative are really excited about this, and we have all worked hard to
    get to this point. Huge numbers of people have been asking for the
    source since we announced the driver development project early this
    year. Many of those same e-mails were from people who wanted to be able
    to hack the driver sources themselves. Well, here's what you all have
    been asking for all year, and what we promised you back in February.

    Happy hacking!

    Jon Taylor
    Linux Driver Engineer
    Creative Labs
    jtaylor@creativelabs.com
  • I got one of those Creative TNT boards as well. in fact, I went out and bought it SPECIFICALLY because it works well under Linux. (my old card, with an i760 chipset, did NOT until 3.3.1, if I remember correctly) cheers to creative for figuring out that this is a Good Thing, and we're likely to buy a lot more hardware now.

    has anyone else been emailing them and bugging them like I have? every single time I have a problem with Creative's hardware (which, given the DxR2, is a lot) I stick in a "oh yeah, and WHEN will this work with linux?"...

    now I'm waiting for them DVD drivers. even closed source. software decoding is fine too. just let me watch the movies!!!

    Lea
  • There are such things are "winprinters" which rely on specific parts of Windows and can't run without them. They're even more tied to Windows than the winmodems, though I don't know if this actually is one.

  • Creative Drivers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From talking to someone at Loki, who is doing the majority of the 3D sound API programming, it is not in Creative's best interest to release the binary only part in source code. If Creative did that, they would be giving away the heart and sole of the SB Live. It would make it literally an overnight project for one of Creative's competitors to create a card that can match the SB Live and come in at a lower price point.
  • (that was a Dr King-ish pun for the unknowing)


    this is probably some of the greatest new i have ever heard - i grabbed the SBLive! value when it came out, and after running it for months in my windows machine and loving the eviornmental audio, when i upgraded my linux box to rh6.1, i decided to swap the sound cards and try out some enviornmental audio in linux (oh how silly i was).

    much to my chagrin, i went to creative's site and found (oh the horror...) object files!! YUCK! I was not happy. And as if that wasn't enough of a kick in the head, the last kernel they compiled it for was 2.2.10 - i would have to DOWNGRADE my kernel to run it! No way! I didn't feel like doing that, so a couple days and an "insmod -f" later, i had sound.
    of course, no special features or anything, and i couldn't play .au files, but sound none the less.

    So i was happy for a little while, but it didn't last very long, eventually i just became bitter towards creative - wrote them some e-mail asking for better drivers (them:"we'll have one out early 2000"). and so i eventually just decided to live with the fact that i had an awesome soundcard made by a bunch of bastards.

    and then comes this story! woo hoo! I love creative!!! - i'm proud to own a card made by such a wonderful company :)

    ---

  • A Test of Open Source vs. Closed Development (Score:3)

    by HomerJ ( 11142 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @07:15AM (#1575804)
    After reading the article, it seems that Creative will have two sets of driver for linux. They will have their official "binary-only" driver, and the Open Source(tm) driver.

    This is a first. Where a company not only released their source for a driver, but are also making their only closed driver. Creative, and any other company, will see first-hand at what opening up source will do. Because they will have something to test it against with the binary-only driver that Creative is making.

    In a couple months, Creative will realease their new binary-only driver and say "our driver does this, that, and the otherthing", and whoever is taking up the Open Source lead will go"our driver does all of that, is more stable at doing it, and has features that you never would have though of"

    Let's hope that other companies see the light of what opening up drivers can do. Not only does it make for a better product, but I bet opening the drivers sold about a couple hundred thousand SB Live! cards to linux users that would have sooner pissed on the card yesterday then bought one due to linux support and drivers.
  • The current binaries do not support for smp boxes. Anyone know why and will this continue? Hopefully and probably not but just seeing if anyone else has an answer.
  • I imagine the reason is quality control. Their job supporting their hardware on the windows platform would be made a lot harder if they had to support 'Joe Bob's L33T SBLive drivers" with hacked vqf playback support as well as their own drivers.
    I am actually surprised, beyond the thread of reverse engineering their other concern has to be product support - bad support looks horrible on them, and they have no way to support drivers that other people are making.
    I imagine they just got convinced that the new drivers couldn't possibly be worse than the existing ones, and that they could weasel their way out of supporting people not using windows ;-)

  • Slashdot Sux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A while back I suggested slashdot keep a blacklist of hardware vendors that do not release specs to opensource developers, this would have a profound effect and expediate a company's support of the opensource world, they CANT take bad press. I still think its important to do this... make some noise :) P.S: you have the right to speak, but can you afford to?
  • This is exactly what a lot of people are thinking right now. I bought a SBLive several months ago because I saw that creative had released a driver for Linux. It was only later that I found that the driver was horribly crippled, and not open source.

    People have been bugging them forever to open it, but their response has been that the functionality of the SBLive is "1/3 hardware, 1/3 software, and 1/3 DSP code" (these were the approximate words of the Creative person who replied).

    Unfortunately, some of that code will likely stay closed, simply to protect their IP. All I can say is that whatever they open, it's about time! Creative has a policy of not responding to emails or posts to their newgroups, and so there were endless floods of frustrated, bewildered people. Nobody really knew what was going on behind the doors at Creative, and there was precious little in the way of authoritative info from them. It was only recently that they even put up a FAQ. I have to sympathize with them a little though... There were some people who flamed them mercilessly (publicly), and I'm sure there were even more who did it privately via email.
  • Perhaps you should have said: open source game offerings. Loki does have some open-source stuff on the web (mainly related to bugtracking and a/v playback).
  • I wonder if this will include support for Creative Lab's newly released cards, which have MP3 acceleration (whoo, my old Pentium needs a break). They've also got something called the "Live! Drive" that fits in a 5 1/4" drive bay with all the plugs on the front. Mega-cool.

    Does anyone know if there is any support for external MIDI devices on linux right now? (keyboard, etc. for MIDI input).
  • I remember I got a TNT card just becuase NVidia released open source drivers for them. However, it didn't matter that much, becuase they haven't gotten any real updates besides having xscreensaver opengl hacks to not flicker. I also heard even the lowly g200 is faster than a TNT under linux, becuase they have actual programming specs.

    So, I would like to ask, will specs be released and are they needed to make sound card drivers? I am pretty sure that I will not contribute anything besides maybe bug reports, even if specs are released, but with specs, I would suspect a better driver would be released. I hope it won't end up like the TNT drivers, where nobody changes them becuase they have no idea what to do without specs.
  • opening up their hardware will hopefully convince others without open drivers (you know who you are) to open up their source. Big companies opening their source like this shows some appriciated confidence in Linux. Woohoo

  • Re: (Score:2)

    by nmos ( 25822 )
    I'd just add that these Win-Devices are a bad idea even when you are using a supported OS. With a normal printer you can troubleshoot problems by just dumping plain text to the parallel port. In addition, since the drivers are more complicated there is more chance that they won't work when you upgrade your OS or may conflict with other software on your system. Of course since these are normally cheap devices the odds that the vendor will spend the money to update their drivers are lower as well. You can also forget using drivers for some other "compatable" device until yours is fully supported (how many printers are there that can use either Epson or HP drivers in a pinch?)
  • I've been an avid gamer since the days of the Apple II+. I'm not an audiophile, and I've always had a bah-humbug attitude towards frilly little features like 3D audio, but I had a good sized budget for my last machine, so I decided to get a SB Live and a Dolby Digital 5.1 speaker system to go with it. I was blown away. It is incredibly immersive, not to mention a big advantage in gameplay - you can hear which direction gunfire is coming from. You can hear which direction enemies are approaching from even when you can't see them. I now consider 3D audio to be a crucial element of my games, and an important step in making Linux a rocking game platform.

    A while back, I got a dualshock controller for my Playstation - just for the analog joysticks, but I was amazed at how effective those two little vibrators in the handles are at making the game come to life. I'm now a convert to force feedback as well. I picked up a Logitech Wingman Force the other day, and I absolutely love it. Implementing the IForce library in Linux would be a very good thing - has anyone heard about programming specs for the Wingman Force? They have a 16 bit controller onboard and a USB connection - just think, we could make a Beowulf cluster ;-)
  • I've always felt that Aureal's Vortex cards were better technology than the SB Live, but with this announcement I might get an SB Live anyway. Currently, the only way to get any sound support in Linux with a Vortex or Vortex 2 is by purchasing the OSS sound drivers (and even then it's only beta). I actually did this for the Vortex 1 I have now, and I have been thinking about upgrading to a Vortex 2 soon. But even when the drivers are out of beta this won't give you 3D sound in Linux, just regular sound. It seams that Aureal is beginning to take the Linux market more seriously as they have announced they will develop their own Linux drivers which will be available for free, but they still won't be open and at this point all we have is a promise. They may very well delay the drivers as companies often do.

    Compare this to Creative, who are now not only announcing that their already available (and free) drivers will be made open, but they are also planning on actually implementing 3D sound in Linux. I don't particularily like Creative, but you've got to love this!

    As I said before, I think Aureal has better hardware. And their 3D sound is considerably more sophisticated as they implement "wavetracing" in which the path of the sound wave is actually modelled. But does this matter if they don't have 3D sound support in Linux? OK, 3D sound is mostly used in games and most games are still in windoze, so I pretty much have windoze on my computer for the sole purpose of playing games. Lack of 3D sound in Linux didn't bother me before because there were nothing in Linux that could actually take advantage of it. This situation is thankfully starting to change. 3D video support in Linux is improving by leaps and bounds and many more games are being made available for Linux. But until now there just hasn't been any 3D sound.

    So, just in case anyone from Aureal is here, if you don't offer something comparable my next sound card will be a SB Live even though I think it's inferior technology and I don't like Creative. OK?
  • I meant winprinter in the same vien as winmodems.
    "We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
  • You can try to use my aureal driver (available as a kernel patch for 2.2.13) at http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~zivav/vortex.
    Only the mixer is supported, so it is not yet very useful, but that's a start.

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Eccles ( 932 )
    Check out the pbm2ppa project (via freshmeat or this site. [httptech.com]) Color support is lacking though, and the last code update seems to have been a year ago.

    Certainly there are other printers that are better suited for Linux, and HP deserves a large raspberry for refusing to reveal details of their printer protocol.
  • Hrm... my response disappeared.

    Anyway... yes, there are GPL'd drivers in the FreeBSD source. They're carefully modular in case they need to be torn out in the event of conflict, but it hasn't happened yet.

    The GPL and BSD licenses aren't THAT incompatible. I'm pretty sure its only when someone decides to take a source fork commercial that problems occur.
    --
    Brandon Hume
    hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
  • http://linuxdvd.webjump.com

    watch your dvd's

  • When I bought my latest computer last year, I naively decided to get a SB Live! since it seemed like such a cool card, and it was by Creative, so how could there not be Linux drivers for it?

    When I discovered there were no drivers, and that Creative was not releasing the specifications, I was understandably disappointed. After the first beta drivers came out, I could at least get some sound out of the card. But some games didn't work with it, and it still had less functionality than the AWE32 driver. So my younger brother got a free upgrade from AWE32 to SB Live!, and I got a free downgrade that gave me more functionality. If the driver at that time had been open source, I honestly would have spent my whole summer hacking it to do cool stuff.

    My point? This is a VERY SMART MOVE by Creative. There are a LOT of DSP hackers in college, just itching to write cool DSP code. Sound has been an often neglected field of hacking. We are on the verge of a Renaissance in sound. Under Linux, there is a good abstraction layer between the programmer and the soundcard. All the demo programmers, trackers, general code hackers, etc. are coming to Linux. The Linux crew has traditionally been made up of more 'mature' programmers. But with the rise in popularity of Linux, the migration is inevitable. And these people will bring new ideas of what is "cool" to program. Look for lots of cool sound programs in the next couple years.

  • No, YOU'RE wrong. WinPrinters are a special class of hardware (similar to WinModems) that require a (currently) Windows-only driver developed by the manufacturer in order to work. And don't say something like "Well, why doesn't someone write a driver themselves?", because it's damn near impossible.

    The reason I say that is because printers normally contain a bundle of hardware to handle interpreting the commands sent from the computer, buffering data, in some cases handling rasterizing, etc. For example, an old Epson printer would buffer and interpret commands in the Esc/P language, which meant that you could write a driver that output Esc/P (the specifics of which were generally available to the public) and send it to the printer. In the case of PostScript, all the computer has to do is throw the PostScript file (which can be plain ASCII) at the printer - the printer would buffer the PS data (in higher-end printers, the buffer might be 8MB or more), rasterize it (usually with a RISC processor dedicated to the task) and then print the end result.

    Of course, all of that costs money, so some bright spark came up with the idea of WinPrinters, which are basically only a buffer. The computer does everything else - command interpretation, rasterizing, whatever - and blasts the result at the printer in pure binary form, ready for printing. This means that unless you have a VERY precise idea of what binary data the printer is expecting, you don't have a hope in hell of writing a driver, not to mention that doing all the work on the computer side can be quite a strain for older machines.
  • Then they will find out that have definately have gotten at least one more new SB Live customer, ... and possibly developer!

    I have a 6x/3dxr DVD decoder kit, and I've been dieing to couple it to the SB Live (so I get four speaker output.) The Linux angle was the only thing holding me back.

    The only question now is... Regular or Platinum?

  • Is it released already? I thought that they said that CVS and Bugzilla is not going to ready for at least a week, or so.
    --

  • I'll be swayed by the weight of the "open source games" argument when you can point to something that _isn't_ a carbon copy of a five to ten year old game.

    I mean, what do you have to present as a counter-argument? Freeciv and Pingus. A Civilisation clone, and a Lemmings clone. Clones of games that still might play well, but are way past their use-by dates as far as the available technology goes.

    Open source evanglism is all well and good, but eventually you'll have to come up with the goods. Show me an open source StarCraft or Half Life, and _then_ I'll be listening.

    Until then, until the open source movement comes up with something of the same calibre as Civ:CTP, then I'll be happy to continue to support Loki, and their uber cool games.

    Charles Miller
  • I don't see it being included in the FreeBSD distro anytime soon. This article states the drivers will be released under GPL Licence. That, if I have my licences figured out correctly, means that they can't be used in a program that is licensed BSD.

    Ian

  • DVD? (Score:1)

    by Indomitus ( 578 )
    It's good to see them making this bold of a move and I'd like to add my voice to the thanks that other posters have given.

    With that said, I just hope that I can get the software for my Creative Dxr3 DVD board and player sometime. I know it can't be OS due to patent/copyright/whatever problems but I'd accept any from-Creative ware that lets me reboot to Windows even less than I do now (actually, with a DVD player for Linux, that would only be for Halflife playing. Valve?).
  • The other problem is that some manufacturers, here in europe at least, will mark a printer as "windows" if it only includes a parallel port, and "windows+mac" if it includes a parallel and serial interface. Some of the printers marked "windows only" actually work fine on linux.
    For example, the Epson Stylus Color 640 does not differ much from the old 600, except that it leaves out some of the more obscure ESC/P2 commands, but it is badged "windows only"...It worked fine on my amiga, let alone linux...

    This is different to the "WinPrinter" models you describe, which are marked, often with identical logos, as "windows only". This can get very irritating, as I'm sure you can imagine - but we can blame it all on microsoft - they push the "windows printer" mark, presumably to encourage lock-in....


  • now that you mention it, i want a beowulf cluster of sblives running seti@home on linux!!!


    (yeah yeah yeah, if you're gonna have a beowulf, why run something like seti..... but it goes w/ the theme of the post)
  • I read the ga-source article on this, a open-source and a binary. Doesn't this mean that they are going to make a opensource driver that uses the binary file yo the actualy program Live prosessor? It feels more open than it actually is, no actual programming specs for the prosessor...

    Or then the other possibility will be that there will be a full and limited opensource driver and a different binary driver with more features.

    But don't get me wrong, it's a good thing they make drivers for linux and even make a 3d sound api, but I really would like to see how you program that live prosessor (and do something weird with it)..
  • Wow sounds cool.

    I remember the original NeXT hardware had a general purpose DSP included. Unfortunately, nobody really knew how to program it or what to with it. I hope some Linux hackers figure it out.
  • Hey look at the bright side - at least it wasn't a $900 3D card or something. Used Live! Value's can be picked up on EBay for less than $50. Forgoe pizza for a few Friday's and you should be good.

  • Re:It makes sense. Now they see the sense. (Score:3)

    by Tarnar ( 20289 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @05:56PM (#1575844) Homepage
    Sure, they're seeing the sense like nVidea did. The problem is that its still only Half Way There. Drivers are one thing, specs are another. If I'm reading this right, then much like the nVidea driver, we'll have source we can play with, but no specs. And without specs, just what are we going to do to IMPROVE these drivers?

    Peer review is one of the founding points of Open Source software. And while efforts like this are WAY better then nothing at all, without specs there can be no peer review. Lets contrast two recent Big Hardware moves to Open Source, Matrox and nVidea.

    nVidea released an opensource driver based on SGI's recently opensourced glx protocol. Right off the bat, you could play Q3Test on your nVidea card.

    Matrox released specs for their G200/G400 cards. The driver took a while, but now plays Q3Test. And thanks to the specs being there, the driver is still being added to. The nVidea driver has no DMA, no AGP. The Matrox driver has these. And without specs, they can't be added to the nVidea one.

    Anyway, that was my example. My point is that now that we're getting open source drivers, lets push for specs too. We'll end up with better drivers then.
  • >Second, the API (openAL) is not a Creative API,
    >it's Loki's API, which was going to be LGPLed from
    >day 1, and Scott Draeker approached Creative for
    >technical assistance.

    >Scott, being the Open Source evangelist that he is
    >(no, that wasn't sarcastic) must've done some
    >convincing of Creative executives :)

    To give credit where it's due, Creative was *really* excited about the project. Not a whole lot of convincing necessary :-)

    Scott Draeker
  • I have a SB live running under 2.2.13 and I have had no system problems what so ever. I think I am using the 2.2.10 driver. Don't scare people so bad ! I don't think anyone is runnig a SB live in a production server anywhere.
  • I DO happen to remember on the kernel mailing list.. when Creative was first talking about linux driver development (and they were looking for a couple of experienced kernel hackers), that they said the drivers would be open-sourced once there was a working example driver out there...

    that was the gist of it anyway...

    smash(just bought an SB-Live last week too... :)
  • Wrong... I have a OCed 350A SMP system running a SB live ... it works just fine. (well as fine as the current Non GPL driver allow).

  • Others should follow (Score:4)

    by chazR ( 41002 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @02:43AM (#1575849) Homepage
    This makes a lot of sense for everyone. Creative makes excellent hardware. Software (drivers) is not their core business. By opening the source under an appropriate licence (I believe GPL in this case), they get access to a all the benefits of open source development (thousands of skilled programmers, many eyes to spot bugs etc)

    What they risk is that it makes it a bit easier for their competitors to reverse engineer their products. This is a very small risk. I am sure their competitors are quite capable of reverse engineering without the source.

    The benefit is that this could give them a serious competitive edge. Their drivers should become significantly better than those of their closed-source competitors. They also stand to gain a significant amount of customer loyalty from Linux geeks.

    This should allow them to increase their focus on producing great hardware.

    I am a bit disappointed that they haven't opened the source to their drivers for other platforms. I suspect this is because they don't think there are enough open-source Win32 programmers. I think they are wrong on this. However, with the Linux source it should be possible (not easy, but possible) to write drivers for Windoze etc. if we want to.

    I hope other hardware manufacturers follow. I have seen several brilliant bits of hardware totally compromised by shoddy drivers.
  • The problem with 3D sound card drivers is that they are not drivers in the pure sense of the word... theres a lot of IP caught up in them. In fact Id be totally surprised if the "open source" drivers from Creative Labs didnt have some large pieces of binary code to be uploaded to the soundcards processor. (not my idea of open source, but hey Linus says its ok... so who am I to make judgement) For Aureal it is even more difficult since most of their software is host side... but there are solutions for that as NVIDIA has shown, just deliver an OS independent low level library. Their library is even platform independent, the source is included... its just run through the preprocessor, useless from an open source perspective but works well for platform independance. But no tears lost for Aureal, they might be the underdog they are still anti-competive, bit of the 3dfx of soundcards.
  • Maybe it was your purchase that made the difference. If Creative had 100% of the market share, there would be no reason for them to release Linux drivers, especially open-source ones. So, maybe you, and many others, helped influence this decision. :)

    The above may seem like flamebait, but before you consider it so, please remember that Creative is a corporation. Their top priority is making money.

    --

  • This is very good, I just upgraded to RH 6.1 and found out that the current SB-Live drivers weren't compiled for 2.2.12.
    Now I'll be compiling it on my own next monday :-)
  • This is making Creative Labs cooler. However, I am not going to jump of joy until they release all their stuff for Linux. Not all has to be Open Source, but I think that the drivers should be. Which is what they seem to be doing. However, let us remember, that other vendors do this without asking. They release hardware specs and code to Linux developers instantly. So dont get over excited over Creative's little thing here.

    Sincerely,

    Alexander

  • >I am a bit disappointed that they haven't opened the source to their drivers for other platforms. I suspect this is because they don't think there are enough open-source Win32 programmers. I think they are wrong on this. However, with the Linux source it should be possible (not easy, but possible) to write drivers for Windoze etc. if we want to.

    I guess the reason for going open-source with their Linux drivers is simply that they are busy with other things and want to speed up development without adding more costs. (Their new SB Live isn't directly compatible to the old SB standard and therefore doesn't work with the existing SB drivers, so they had to develop a new one and probably answer thousands of requests)

    Just like other soundcard developers (like Terratec) Creative have always been very reluctant to releasing specs and source code. As their Win32 drivers are already functionning very well, they do not need to put much work into them because apart from bug-fixing they're finished.

    Now that's only a guess of mine. Does any insider have more info on why they made that step?

  • Yes, way to go Creative... (Score:5)

    by smash_phase ( 95484 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @03:10AM (#1575857) Homepage
    As you might or might now know, I'm running a
    SB Live! under Linux page, I just have some things
    I like to say..
    A lot of ppl already know, Creative went a long, long way from releasing a binary only kernel specific driver, developing at a slow speed with loads of bugs, towards finally even having a FAQ and supporting CVS under GPL and supporting
    people who wants to make their own driver under Linux. I you look at Creative, at first being not willing to provide 4front with the nessary information, to continue development and also not seeming to understand the need of having the source available or chopping up the driver into a kernel independant part with source
    and a binary part for the DSP
    (just check my page on the details..)
    that's a big difference...
    And Creative also didn't spend much resources
    on Linux, because that's not where to money comes
    from (We don't buy any Live Ware 3 or whatever upgrades)
    But it now seems like Creative fully changed course and is also spending more resources on this thing (also with hiring Jon Taylor, a very good move) they even are working on finding a way
    to support 3D audio or EAX, since Aureal thinks,
    that's up to Creative, this is a very important step...
    I think this move looks very good, also since
    Aureal is also working on Linux support,
    it really shows that times are changing for Linux
    and that even heavy commercial compagnies like
    Creative are realizing this..
    This is sure much more than I ever hoped for
    and to be honest, after seeing a message that
    someone was going to buy a SB Live! because he
    saw that there was at least a page that supported
    it, was almost a reason for me to dismantle it.
    Because I only started this page out of the frustration, not being given any support from Creative (like a FAQ or proper install instructions)..

    Manuel Beunder (also going under MBr)

    http://www.euronet.nl/~mailme
    The SB Live! Linux page
  • They may have changed their minds since then.

    We'll have to see.

  • First MP3 speeds are in kbits/sec not kbytes/sec

    I have no idea what the specs on the SB live are, but they are alot faster then that. For one thing, it is 4 channel not 2, so 48k * 4 * 16 bits = 3Mbits/sec. But that is totally imaterial as that is the is the output speed of the sound samples. While it is spitting out 3Mbits/s, the DSP needs a whole lot of clock cycles to apply all the effects. In addition it needs time to combine all the seperate digital input channels as well as sampling the line-in, mic-in and other analog inputs.

    Trust me that DSP can process a lot data at once.

  • The sblive drivers currently do NOT work in SMP systems, so you might want to wait to see if the Open Source drivers can be adapted for dual rigs (and if someone is willing to do the work)
  • Yay, this makes me even more happy that I chose a soundcard by A3D, hoping to support competition rather than the market leader, when I bought my computer way back when. A year later, and now those who chose SB Live's have a opensource drivers, and what do I have? A $30 closed source (crippled and buggy) solution from Opensound, and Aureal support claiming they might have drivers out "towards the end of 1999" (though they also claim they will be "more open-source" whatever that means).

    I got tired of having no sound under Linux for my $30 Aureal A3D card. So, when I was out buying Civ:CTP for Linux, I also picked up a $30 Ensoniq AudioPCI card, which works great under Linux. Problem solved!

  • I'm sure that some compliments couldn't hurt their commitment to making the SB Live! work better with Linux (and other OSes, by the way). Pat them on their collective head and tell them they've been good. :)

    Comments developer relations can be emailed to dev-questions@creative.com [mailto] or submitted by web at http://developer.soundblaster.com/feedb ack/ [soundblaster.com].

    If anyone has any other addresses which may be appropriate, feel free to post 'em!

  • A note on the linux driver faq at creative mentions that the driver will have SMP support when it hits 1.0 ... my guess is that they just want to get a stable driver working (which would no doubt be easier without worrying about SMP) and then make it SMP safe...

    Of course, when the kernel patches arrive, people will be free to make it SMP safe themselves :)

    smash

  • I hate to be an AOLer, but "Me Too" :-)

    I specifically bought my HoonTech Trident 4DWaveNX because of the ALSA support. (http://www.project-alsa.org [project-alsa.org]) It took me a while to find a company that sold 4Dwave but I am glad I did instead of buying one of the SB cards that all the local stores are pushing.

    Hoontech [hoontech.com] can be found at http://www.hoontech.com/.

    If you are in Canada you can order HoonTech products from Votron Electronics [votronelectronics.com] (in Ontario) at http://www.votronelectronics.com/hoontech/order.ht m

    Thinking of HoonTech, does anyone have one of thier amps? I was thinking of getting the PA2000 to connect my machine to a couple of nice big unpowered speakers. It looks like it should fit into a 5 1/2 drive bay, does it?

  • I'm just repeating what Creative told me so I don't know exactly either way. I would agree with you though, maybe they were talking about the hardware spec, I don't remember.
  • Well, this is the final impetus I needed to order Redhat 6.1 from CheapBytes--I'd been holding off before because the Live! binary driver only worked with the 6.0 kernel I plastered over my 5.9 system (and then only grudgingly, complaining about the -15 version indicator of all things). I've emailed at least twice asking for the SBL! source to be opened; I'm glad that against all odds, Creative finally listened to reason and agreed to do so.

    Gonna be nice to be on the bleeding-edge side of the non-experimental setups again.
  • Thanks for the above advice and for emailing these companies asking for drivers. I also hope that everyone who asked Creative Labs for open-source drivers now emails them and thanks them.

    HH
  • I'm not worried about people running SBLive on production equipment... I was trying to make a point about Linux's stability... when people bypass the checks and the system crashes it adds to the "see, all OS' crash like WinBlows."
  • No, I don't hate you. Thanks for the reply and answering my question. It's not your fault that a company "ties" itself to another in this particular way.

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • Thanks for making me feel small and insignificant in my total lack of knowledge. I appreciate it. ;-)

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • I dont remember the exact number but its a little above 100 channels you can send to the card at once. The MIDI-synth on the card uses the host computers memory over the PCI-bus and it handles 64 voices simultainously, so theres quite a lot of bandwidth there. There can also be 32 wave streams sent to the card, all mixed and processed by creaties cute 3d effects if you want that..

    So sending stuff to the card should be no problem, but I remeber reading an interview with E-mus chief technichian Dave Rossum, and when the asked him if the EMU10k1 dsp would be capable of doin things like MPEG-2 decoding, he said it could not be done because MPEG-2 decoding was done in the frequency domain and that the EMU10K1 is a time-domain processor. I think the same would apply to encoding MP3 files, not that i know that much a bout the algorithms behind but there is sure as hell a lot of frequency-domain stuff involved.
  • Yup. Fair point.

    I'm not saying you (or anyone) shouldn't support Loki.

    I question your claim that Half-Life is anything 'new' or 'exciting'. Half-Life is just Quake with different graphics and tweaked gameplay. Similarly, StarCraft was just WarCraft with new graphics.

    Whereas FreeCiv, I think, is a classic :) But we probably have different taste in games - fair enough.

    The open source gaming scene is taking off. In a couple of years time, it will be much more exciting.

    Jules
  • First off, Thanks Scott for whatever part you played in making this happen! Can you give us an insiders view of the difficulty involved in supporting Environmental Audio? I thought it was itself proprietary. What is the situation with regard to directx support under linux? Will this become a part of the kernel so I don't have to patch something everytime I upgrade?
  • D*mn, I ment preview not post... Ah well.. (might now=might not)

  • The importance of whining. (Score:3)

    by lazyr ( 35677 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @03:25AM (#1575879) Homepage

    At last!

    I'm proud to say that I've mailed SoundBlaster at least twice to tell them politely that I think they should OpenSource their drivers, pointing at other companies doing so, at the ALSA team's (admirable and steadfast) refusal to use the emu10k1 code as long as it isn't opened to the public, and at what they've got to loose (nothing, or close to it).

    What they achieve by doing this is, at least, that I won't throw my SB Live out the window and buy a card from a company that's opensourced their drivers. And, as many others have pointed out, it's a public stunt, and probably gives them a feather in the hat on Wall Street as well. I don't care that they didn't OpenSource the Windows drivers, and I think it's appropriate too, as Windows itself isn't particulary OpenSource. Let them have their model, and we will have ours.

    What I really wrote in to say is that if you have a piece of hardware, whose spesifications isn't released, you shold go to the website of the companiy that made it, search out the appropriate email address, and write them (politely!) about it, explaining the need, the motivation and the reward. Customer feedback is important fuel for decision making.

    After all, without customers....

  • Trident 4D Wave is still better. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Trident 4D Wave cards are better and cheaper.
    Trident has been open longer, and help writting ALSA.
  • This is already being done.....the new XFree86 4.0 server with it's GLX and Mesa capabilities will be "our" version of DirectDraw and Direct3D. ALSA is headed towards becoming the DirectSound and (correct me if I'm wrong) the XFree server will also handle the configuration of gaming devices (joysticks etc) so there's the DirectInput.....now...did I miss anything?
  • If you don't want to compile the kernel yourself, just wait a couple more days - we're aware of the release, and we're already building a kernel RPM that has the driver.
  • What about HP's drivers for their newer printers? I have a 712C and would love to have it work under Linux. Don't tell me to write it myself, because I'm not quite there yet (working on it). It seems with the interest HP has taken in the "Open Source" movement, they would be interested in this. They would also sell more printers :-) I do know that Linux Mandrake has Alpha/Beta drivers for it.

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • As large-scale vendors slowly move to add linux to their list of preloaded OSes. Perhaps they requested a driver from Creative. "Or we will have to use another Card" As it would be in Dell's or Gateway's best interest to limit the number of soundcards they have on hand.

  • Re:It makes sense. Now they see the sense. (Score:3)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Saturday October 30, 1999 @04:03AM (#1575899) Homepage
    Actually, hardware companies do make money from the drivers. For a distressingly large number of cards nowadays, the difference between the cheap model, the mid-range model, and the top-of-the-line model is just the firmware downloaded to the DSP or CPU on the card.

    For the non-cheap cards from such manufacturers, it is the drivers that are making them the money.

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