| Sound Blaster Live! | ||||||||
| Introduction I've been waiting for this card for a long time now as I'm sure many have. Several times I considered spending up on one or two of the more recent cards from other manufacturers, Terratec and AVM come to mind. I did add a Yamaha DB50XG daughterboard to my Awe32 in particular for it's massively better drums. In fact I have yet to hear better acoustic drums on any soundcard. I had more than one reason to wait for the next Creative card. Mainly, I didn't want to have to throw away all my custom Soundfonts. I also wanted a PCI card and I wanted it to be more than just a better specified Awe32. Most other cards were either ISA-based like the Terratec (which also wants three IRQ's that I can't afford to give up) or didn't offer enough new features to warrant giving up my Soundfonts. I believe that the AWE series cards are extremely useable and only let down by slightly noisy DAC's and lack of 16 bit full duplex operation. I say slightly noisy in reference to my own card and I have experienced some cards that are noisier than others though mine is generally quite quiet. I hope that the new SB Live doesn't vary quite as much during manufacture as the older cards seemed to. I decided I couldn't wait and ordered an SB Live! as soon as one became available here in NZ. Whether I should have waited for an in-depth review is what I intend to find out and tell you all here. Unpacking The Box contains:
There are also quite a few leaflets and of course the user- and installation guide. The latter is supplemented by a quick-start pamphlet which did prove useful as it became necessary to manually browse to the folder on the CD which contains the drivers. Not a very smart installation program.
What do I think is missing?
Footnote: My particular card has some strange fogging along one edge of the card on the underside. It extends about one third of the way across the board and gives the appearance of something corrosive as it has discoloured the solder joins. I received this card in an unopened cellophane wrapped box obviously straight from the factory. I decided to install the card anyway and see what happens. Installation After removing a cheap scanner SCSI card that never really worked anyway, I installed the Live! and the Digital I/O cards. On rebooting, Win98 detected several new components and installed or asked for suitable drivers, which were found on the installation CD. I left my Awe32 in place and this caused the one and only conflict I encountered. Both cards have the same joystick port and requested the same resources. Disabling the one on the Awe32 solved the problem. Software I decided to install most of what the CD's wanted to install and then remove the useless bits later. It turns out that the only application you absolutely must have installed is the "Audio HQ" that's HQ for Headquarters. This app is best left running in the system tray if you want to have quick access to essentials like the new mixer and the Environmental Audio control panel. Audio HQ This application shows itself in the form of a Windows Explorer folder and for the most part it behaves like one. When opened, it displays half a dozen applets that control various aspects of the Live. The size and appearance of this window can be altered as can the method it uses to display the items. What you cannot do here is create shortcuts to the applets for the purpose of adding them to your desktop or your taskbar in IE4 or Win98. You must instead always open the Audio HQ first before accessing the mixer for example. Is this a problem? No, not really. However, I like to have instant access to the mixer in particular so that I can make quick changes to my audio. The SB Live! makes you mess around with the levels and effects far more often than the Awe series. Especially if you have set it up with four speakers and like to play games now and then. I like to set up a general purpose task bar with system and network buttons on an auto-hide bar at the top of my screen. Further, I have a second auto-hide bar at the bottom which contains all my music, graphics and games apps. It also contains an Explorer address bar which comes in handy for typing in commands, folders and addresses. The Live has a similar application called the Creative Launcher and although it's fully configurable and quite tidy, I found it to be slower at responding and it also has extra fields i.e. a button to visit Creative, that I don;t want and just waste space. Even worse, it runs as an extra application every time you boot into Windows and I spend a lot of time keeping my background apps to a minimum; especially if its doing something that Windows can already do even better. So.... in the bin with the Creative Launcher. The only other things worth keeping on your PC are Unreal the game, which although I finished that a week after it was released, I'm going through again just to try out the new 3D sound, and the new Creative Soundfont Librarian. The latter isn't actually part of the CD pack that comes with the card. It is however available here via the new SB Live! web site. The Soundfont Librarian The Soundfont Librarian lets you create tidier Soundfont font banks by simply dragging and dropping fonts Explorer-style between banks. It does this far better than Vienna, but there may be one sticking point which I'll have to confirm when I get around to using it. For example; say you have a font that has a set of samples used to create pianos and it totals 1MB worth of material. In Vienna, you can create dozens of variations on the basic sounds by simply creating new Instrument and Melodic presets. Each new preset still uses the original 1MB of samples thus not significantly increasing the total size of the Soundfont bank. In the case of the new Librarian, it follows that if you drag a preset from one font to another it will take copies of the sample pool with it. The question is; what if you copy another preset that was made from the exact same samples to the new bank? Will it recognise the samples already present in the new bank as ones it needs or will it simply copy another set of samples across? I fear that the latter is most likely as it would otherwise be a bit risky for the application to assume that a sample is the same simply because it has the same name. It would have to compare the samples to determine which are already present and which are not. Sounds like it could get rather complicated. The tour and demos. The otherwise nicely produced tour is let down by the extremely painful voice of the female narrator. Couldn't they get someone without that awful lisp and the "I have no idea what I'm talking about" intonation? The CD includes some very large Cakewalk MIDI/Audio Bun files that demonstrate how Cakewalk should be used when creating a complete CD-ready track. The terribly eighties-sounding songs have heavily processed vocals that were probably recorded in a professional studio sometime last decade. There is some decent rock guitar work and quite a bit of MIDI drumming and bass playing. The overall result is impressive and shows that you can create more than Elektronika on your PC. Whether you want to make music like Richard Marx is another matter altogether. There is another one of those pseudo Rave tracks that completely misses the point of dance music. All in all, the Cakewalk buns and wrk files are well worth loading up for a fiddle with the new effects and to audition the new fonts. There is a rather interesting set of demos by a variety of companies that create Soundfont CD's. Most of these are pretty crap, but again, it's fun to listen to what can be done on your own PC. Remember when listening that most of the demos are in fact created with fonts loaded into the SB Live on the fly. You might want to have a browse through these fonts on the CD afterwards to pick up some sounds. You can also have a laugh at the one that consists of a single note that contains - as the sole preset - a long studio-produced narrated music demo. Find the right key and press it; listen to the biggest font you'll ever come across in one note. Apps for musicians The remainder of the software bundle is I think probably the best set of music production apps ever given away free with a soundcard. Cakewalk Express Gold is a four track audio/midi sequencer with an upgrade path to possibly the most stable and easy to use PC sequencer. Others have more and also more interesting features, but Cakewalk is by far the simplest to set up and use. Soundforge XP is just a few steps down from Soundforge 4.5 the full professional product. It offers very extensive sample editing abilities and is a major step up from the Creative Wavestudio that strangely is still included in the package. Apps for people who need to get out more often The talking Parrot, The talking PC, the pseudo DJ decks, the guitar picker thingy. The less said the better, though on a rainy day, there is still some fun to be had with them. Any new Fonts? About 52MB of EMU Soundfonts are included on top of the 2,4 and 8MB GM banks plus whatever else you can scrounge from the tour and demos. There are some drum kits, a 2MB piano and a "Phatt" bass bank among about thirty items some of which seem familiar from the EMU free-fonts page. There are also three Proteus banks totalling 6.5MB which look interesting. A recent press release by Creative tells of 2500 instruments in 500 banks being made available for free via the SB Live! web site. There should be enough there to keep our ISP's in pocket money for a while. That concludes my initial impression of the SB Live! I have been busy wiring up my CD player and my Awe32 to use the digital inputs of the new card and have written an follow-up to this page which delves in greater detail into the performance aspect of the new card as well as how it compares to my Awe32 PnP.
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