I recently purchased the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro Series PCI Express Sound Card and installed it on my Win7 x64 Home Premium system. I had some initial problems installing the card, but after running an update from the Creative website (Product Identification Module Update) everything sorted itself out. The autoupdater kept on crashing while installing drivers and apps, so I had to download and install things manually. All that went okay and things worked fine.
I discovered that the Creative drivers have a bug that stems from the implementation of Vista. With Vista Microsoft disabled all calls to Directsound3D, breaking the sound systems for all previous games using DirectX and EAX (but not OpenAL). That is why we have Alchemy of course, and that works fine. However, with some games, Alchemy's dsound.dll doesn't unload properly. This breaks the ability of the Creative drivers to let the Creative software switch between the audio modes of xfi cards (Game mode, Entertainment mode, Audio Creation mode). The selection is simply stuck on Game mode until you either reboot, or unload all the software that interact with the card (including volume panel), disable it in hardware management, and re-enable it.
This was very new to me, and I wasn't quite in the habit yet, so I switched mode without the reboot. Oddly the card responded, but added a constant background noise. I couldn't get rid of it, so I decided to try the new beta drivers for the card. That fixed the problem, but it created another problem. While the card functions correctly and has perfect sound, I cannot get the Creative software to recognize it any more. It just responds that there is no supported device detected. This is not a problem with the beta drivers! Unfortunately it is far more general.
In reality, it is a little app, that is part of the drivers called "Creative Audio Control Panel" found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Creative\AudioCS\CTAudCS.exe that powers the ability of the software to recognize and configure the card. If that baby doesn't find the card, you cannot configure it with any other app. However, Creative Autoupdater has no problem finding it and suggesting all sorts of software.
I have cleaned out all the apps and the drivers, run Driver Cleaner, Driver Sweeper, CrapCleaner, defragged registry, reinstalled various versions and modifications of drivers and apps, more times than I can recount, but nothing helps. I am stuck here, and just get the same message: "The audio device supported by this application is not detected. The application will exit". The audio itself works fine, there is nothing unusual in device manager, drivers are loaded fine, all services are up and running, yet Creative Audio Control Panel just can't find it and let me change settings on the card. All other Creative software of course can't find it either, and also respond with a error message, although each one is phrased slightly different.
I have googled the crap out of this problem and found that it has been prevalent with Creative drivers since Vista, with a few cases belonging to XP, along the breadth of the Audigy and xfi cards series. The consensus seems to be that only a format and fresh installation of the OS fixes the problem... Seriously, after 7 years Creative still doesn't have an explanation or a fix?
Anyway, I loathe to backup all my useless crap and reinstall win7. Does anybody have a good suggestion here? Any feedback (even stuff I might have tried already) will be appreciated.
It's only after we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/13/2011 08:39PM by Morbid.