Since the fiasco over Creative's unethical treatment of a third-party programmer, I've been on the lookout for suitable replacements to the X-Fi audio cards for myself and my group of gaming friends. We're not looking to dump the cards we have, but we've all bought new PCs lately so there has been opportunity to make new choices.

My must-have criteria:

• Good signal-to-noise ratio. - Specs aside, I listen for this. Crank the volume, I don't want to hear background static.
• Hardware channels and/or effects. - Software audio takes more CPU horsepower than most people think. It's not night/day like graphics hardware, but saved cycles still equate to better framerates. Also, software audio often gets a low priority resulting in crackling audio, which I don't want to hear, ever.
• Upmixing to 5.1 - Hardware upmixing is strongly preferred. Most games have surround settings anyway, but I do tend to run Winamp whilst playing games and upmixing without taxing my system is a big plus.

I'd have thought these features would be important to most gamers and audiophiles, but oddly the status-quo = crappy software sound via onboard outputs. I can count the manufacturers of suitable audio cards on just one hand. Below are the choices I've found:

• Creative X-Fi - Any model of the cards with the actual X-Fi chipset are honestly fantastic cards that meet all three of my criteria bang-on. Be careful though, Creative does a nasty switcheroo with the lowend cards and labels X-Fi onto budget cards that actually contain Audigy chipsets (So avoid the "Xtreme Audio" and stick with the "Xtreme Gamer" or better).
• Auzentech X-Fi Prelude - X-Fi in the name and you guessed it, Auzentech is using Creative's chipset, the software appears to be the same too. This is essentially a premium version though, with gold-plated connectors and the quality many expect from Auzentech. Unless I'm mistaken, it's also a fully 24bit version of the X-Fi, which definitely puts it above Creative's. I'm curious to directly compare this card with the X-Fi Xtreme Gamer that I own, but it does also come with a bigger pricetag.
• ASUS Xonar - At first the Xonar looked like a contender to the X-Fi. The Xonar cards have great signal-to-noise specs, plus the benefit of Linux drivers on the near horizon (who knows how long Creative will take on that). ... But... it turns out the Xonar uses a C-Media chipset that is software driven, which is hugely disappointing, especially considering the premium price on these cards. Such a shame, since the light-up connectors are hella cool and I love ASUS.

I sure hope Creative comes to their senses and simply opens up their drivers, for the sake of any OS aside from XP. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, the X-Fi cards are the only quality choice. No matter what evil Creative's legal and driver departments get themselves into, they are essentially the only company that's still supporting the gamer market with real hardware audio.

If you really want to support the competition, I'd say go with Auzentech and get the same (or better) quality while giving a few less coins to Creative.

I just couldn't resist this: Boycott crappy onboard sound.

Update: Apparently Creative has backed down on this particular situation: "we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties". There is some truth in that quote, because Creative has released info in the past for open-source drivers for Linux, etc. although it should be noted that they have not done so with their current X-Fi hardware.

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The latest fiasco with Creative Technology (previously Creative Labs) has some folks screaming boycott, which brings up an interesting point for me personally. It's a whole lot easier to get offended when you don't have a stake.

Take Apple for instance, when they demonstrate obnoxious behaviour I'm the first to exclaim my disbelief that people still buy their products. But I don't depend on Apple for much, my last purchase from them was an iPod Shuffle that failed to impress. It's soooo easy for me to boycott Apple.

With Creative, I'm well aware of their shortsighted idiocy in regards to their overly-protective stance on their drivers. It's directly related to the way their tier their product models, they don't want people getting the full use out of the hardware they've deemed budget. It's ethically corrupt.

I don't mean to pick on Puck, he was right to highlight the situation on his blog and his call for a boycott is perfectly valid too. But I can't help thinking it's an easy thing for him to say if his only tie to Creative is an Audigy (likely 6 years old).

Myself, it's humbling to realize I haven't been so quick to jump down Creative Labs' throats over questionable practices with drivers: I love my Creative Labs X-Fi too much, or at least enough to shrug the nonsense off.

I'm a pretty active guy in the activism sense, at least under certain fields of my expertise. I'm not sure if I should be disappointed in myself, or if I should count myself as being a realist while I cave on this particular issue.

The Success

Earlier this month, I threw Ubuntu Linux on my roommate's PC and was astonished at how slick and painless it was. In some ways, the ease and simplicity surpassed Windows installations and even pre-installed Windows (which inevitably requires more tweaking and updating than it should). I hadn't even pre-planned the Ubuntu installation, it was on a whim, but I had it running Portal smoothly in no time at all.

That was just one installation, one machine. Just a snapshot of success.

The Quirks and Snags

On two other PCs, I had troubles with drivers. There are no workable Linux drivers for my Creative Labs X-Fi, not even for basic sound. Creative Labs themselves are the maintainer of OpenAL, one of the audio APIs on Linux, so that boggles me to say the least. But it doesn't really matter to me who's fault it is: if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Speaking of which, I couldn't get 5.1 surround sound upmixing for my music to work on any of the PCs. The entire interface for configuring audio on the Ubuntu desktop confounded me.

I soon ran into quirks, the kind that are fixable but the sort that I associate with the geek nature of a Linux Desktop. One example is the Numlock state, which is set to Off by default regardless of Bios settings and whether or not the light is on. Confusing to most people, but not hard to fix if you're okay with editing the right config file. My roommate thought Linux was just broken with the Numlock key and I can understand her assumption, you take it for granted with other OSes that it just works right.

I don't mean to Wine

I also had difficulty with Wine, probably because of the aforementioned driver issues. I know Wine isn't a standard feature for Ubuntu, but that's part of the point, running games is paramount as far as I'm concerned. For serious games on Linux, that means Wine. Native gaming on Linux is as abysmal as gaming on a Mac. What Linux really needs is another Loki to actively progress SDL, OpenGL and other game-related APIs and drivers.

My roommate is happier with Ubuntu, it runs smoother than Vista and most of the time Solitaire and Minesweeper will satisfy her. She is quite pleased with the selection of casual games that came with Ubuntu, but on the other hand she owns a few Popcap games and rebooting back to Windows for those is a pain.

Get it there

Linux has always been good at catering to geeks, it's the OS where any coder can add whatever features they want. But a distribution like Ubuntu, which focuses on usability, needs to address the quirks. And they need to approach major vendors like Creative Labs and get those drivers made, because properly functioning hardware is the core of usability.

Entertainment is an essential part of any desktop OS, whether it's listening to surround sound, watching movies, or playing games. Linux itself just needs better solutions in the media area, especially games where the real trick is catering to developers. Wine is impressive, but from an end-user's perspective it's very inconsistent. The native APIs and interfaces have to not only work, but they need to attract serious developers for games and applications.

So the answer from this gamer's perspective? The Linux desktop has jumped leaps and bounds in recent years, but it's still not there yet.

Note: This is a followup to my previous article about the audio issues introduced by WoW Patch 2.2.

According to a Creative Labs post, during a discussion with Blizzard's director of audio it was revealed that:

Initial efforts to turn on hardware support with the new audio implementation were unsuccessful and they didn't have any time left to work on it prior to the patch release. However, he has assured us that once they have had the chance to clear up the immediate issues with in-game audio they will turn their attention back to enabling hardware audio to work again via the new scheme. Creative greatly appreciates the positive response that Blizzard has offered in answer to its concerns, and while there can be no guarantees, we are optimistic that Creative soundcard owners will once again be enjoying a fully immersive WoW experience complete with hardware based 3D mixing and effects in the not-too-distant future.

It seems that Blizzard plans to completely get software sound working within the new system before enabling Hardware sound.

It's encouraging news that they haven't actually abandoned hardware as they indicated before, but they also have not posted this plan on their own forums-- Then again, when does Blizzard ever admit setbacks or compromises on their part?

Aside from poorly communicating with their playerbase, there's still the issue that much of the hardware was never designed to run the way they've tried to push it to run, so I doubt they will get a perfectly working solution until after hardware channels are re-enabled.

Blizzard CMs have been asking players to test the sound on the PTR realms, but patch 2.2.3 is now on the main servers and the PTRs have been shut down pending the next patch.

Blizzard is essentially testing and debugging on a "Live" product, but that's nothing new for MMOs or even PC games overall, so hardly something to uniquely roast Blizzard over the coals for. But they've no doubt lost some subscriptions over this, frustrations for technical issues can get high (as Cyndre pointed out recently with an LOTRO issue: CS and Tech Support Matters).

Patch 2.2.3 does include fixes for software sound but still does not have hardware channel mixing support and numerous problems are still being reported, but hopefully they will make progress with more patches down the road shortly.

Update: I've posted a followup to this article since the release of Patch 2.2.3.

If you've had difficulties with sound this patch, you're far from the only one. The explanation is a bit mind-boggling.

In some bizarre twist of executive decision, Blizzard has taken the existing audio hardware support out of their game and flushed it down the drain, allowing software channels only. Blizzard's own technical support has been grasping at straws, looking for solutions that aren't there, then switching to a new mantra that claims it's fine.

Even seemingly unrelated issues like framerate loss and extra latency have been confirmed by Blizzard techs as being caused by the new software sound system. This is just a small sampling of the related threads on their support forums:

• Sound popping, cutting, and...slicing?
• Sound all crackley?
• Sound Blaster Sound Problems
• Sound fine, but game sound spamming me? Help.
• No Sound Period
• I Sit Here in Silence
• My FPS is dead with this new patch
• Latency: From 350 to 1200 after patch day.
• Ugh.. Latest Patch and SB Audigy Card
• Why did I buy a sound card?
• Sound quality reduced
• Ventrilo with 2.2
• Blue! Some audio testing results
• New Sound software causing crashes
• Voice Emotes Sounds & Much More Not Working
• Please admit your wrong- allow hardware sound
• Sound Card + WoW = 1.4k ms ping
• My Music, and Patch 2.2??

You get the idea.

Most of the CM suggestions on these threads involve turning off audio acceleration completely on your PC, which (aside from not fixing most of the problems and being a horrible downgrade in quality) is an absolutely atrocious idea for any other software that you use. The next time you try to watch a movie in 5.1 surround sound, or play a different game, you're likely to get poor quality or stuttery sound there too. The usage of audio hardware channels is very standard.

They are now clearing the Technical forums of audio software channel problems, locking complaint threads and insisting that players bring up the issue in the Suggestion forums, calling complaints about incorrectly working sound "spam".

It must have seemed like a cost-effective choice to someone who's deaf, because they've thrown away quality audio to save a few bucks in supporting multiple OSes (Mac, WinXP and Vista) under the same API (FMOD, which Blizzard comically refers to as their "unified sound engine" even though it's a third-party API) without using any extensions.

The most boggling part? Creative Labs offered to assist Blizzard with a pre-existing extension patch to FMOD which they've already provided and tested for Bioshock.

For decades as a PC game customer, I've never once seen a developer drop existing hardware support. It's such shoddy work, after 3 years of subscriptions from millions of players. The arrogance of this decision is astonishing.

I strongly urge that anyone who has been experiencing problems or just lousy sound quality since the 2.2 patch, sign this thread on WoW's Suggestion Forums to get Blizzard to bring back audio hardware support to fix their broken sound.

This is one where Blizzard should actually apologize to their playerbase for.