for those who say they're *hardcore* heh.

looked at it. drooled. looked at its size. scoffed.

My boss has one of those... i looked at it and played around with it for a couple of hours, but then decided to not get it as it would not fit in any pocket of any pair of pants i owned comfortably.

free is good: http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/

Hi Brad,
I just bought a bike in Prague, but I discovered is not the right type for Amsterdam
(I suppose the right type must have an umbrella attached).

So I am thinking about selling it again.
Would you be interested in buying it?
We could organize an Amsterdam-Portland bike contest, lending the bike to the first participant.

shit dood, even I got bizness cardz... an I dont even have a phuckan job!

even though i have a sblive! and have for the past 3 years, i'd recommend you try and get one with their new Audigy chip, the Audigy platinum is fucking sweet, and will give you more than enough inputs. They make them with both an external and internal interface. the internal fits in a 5 1/4" slot, the other you can set on your desk, or wherever.

i know the sblive is supported very well under linux now, but i figure you'd be using windows mostly for audio apps (like you mentioned cooledit), and i'm sure it won't be long before they release some sort of drivers for linux.

Ifn you need a sb live card... I have a few. I can send ya one.

If ya want.

My Linksys wireless access point is pretty nice. No problems with it... but don't get their pc card. My Lucent Orinoco card is the bomb.

I'm sitting here at school on wireless access. A coupla days ago I have my first taste of fast net access, a couple days later, fast wireless access. *drool*

dude- avoid the SB Live like the plague. In fact, avoid anything and everything creative makes. They suck. There have not been new drivers for the Live in like a year and a half. The current drivers are incompatible with directx 8 and are really sketchy in general. I am pretty sure there are no linux drivers (although there might be some kind of third-party driver, since they released some semblance of base code a while ago, but all the third-party drivers i have tried have had some kind of fatal flaw that makes them useless even while they fix a lot of the problems in the official drivers). The win2k support is nonexistent - the cards just don't work right in win2k. Creative has abandoned the Live, lied to their customers, and basically sucks the big one. If you wanted to try your luck, their new Audigy line looks pretty cool, but I won't give them anymore of my money because i just cannot trust them to support the hardware more than a year after its release after this whole Live! debacle.

just my 2 cents as a disgruntled creative customer.

Noted.

I'll avoid it as well.

My experience with the Live has been very positive, actually.
The linux drivers (emu10k1) (both ALSA and OSS available) work beautifully, it works fine in windows (duh), and I've never had it flake out on me.

hmm - that's cool about the linux drivers, i admit i was talking out of my ass there, i haven't done anything with linux since i started using the live.

what kind of stuff are you doing with it though? the problems i have had in win98se are like fatal lockups, complete incompatibility with directx8 and thus incompatibility with the newest drivers for my ati graphics card, the drivers are configured in an extremely bogus manner so that by default they install devldr16.exe instead of devldr32.exe, which can cause HUGE problems... my computer is many times more unstable in general because of this damn thing, yet i am attached to it because it's so great for the things it does well.

win2k, the drivers pull this stunt where if you can get it to make sound at all, it tries to fade out the master volume. that is, if you're looking at the volume panel, and you click and drag the master volume up to max, and let go of the mouse button, the slider slowly slides down to the bottom of the slider and the sound fades out as it does so. it's the most bizarre bug i've ever witnessed.

winxp, things are working OK with it but right now windows xp has fatal flaws for me that i have not attributed to anything yet; they might be connected to the sb live. it's a reasonable question considering this thing's troublemaking history.

if creative would just update the drivers and live!ware, the live would be an enormous card. i hope the audigy becomes what the live could have been.. but i'm not coming along for the ride again. glad to hear about your positive experience, at least someone isn't getting bent over by CL.

-=tim=-

Hmm. Have you checked to make sure the live! isn't sharing an IRQ with said graphics card? I had a bit of instability (I have a nvidia gf2gts, btw) before I mucked around with irq assignments. Got an extra 3fps in 3dmark out of that, too. :)
Again, no problems whatsoever with DX8, sound comes out perfectly. I don't know about under w2k or wxp, as I haven't tried either on this box yet, but when I ran whistler beta, the live! worked fine.
Sorry your experience was so bad, and wish I knew what caused it.

it's not the irq - i mean, the fact that the graphics card drivers require directx 8 make the sb live inherently incompatible because it's not compatible with directx8. maybe that's sort of roundabout but it kinda makes sense; that is what i meant with my previous statement.

that said, not everything one does with directx 8 requires doing things different than they did with directx 7. it's when you're using programs that require dx8 that you have the problem. try using acid pro 3.0 or running directsound-enabled games like grand theft auto 2. i think you'll run into the same problems. creative has acknowledged that their drivers are not compatible with dx8.
maybe my belief that new drivers would solve my problems is misguided; but i'm not the only one who feels this way and indeed it's not an original idea on my part. check out the CL newsgroups for substantiation.

:) thanks for the sympathy, more props to you for making the sb work so smoothly for you.