For any of you with Audigy Series Sound Cards and popping/crackling issues in Vista - a fix

[Hachoo]

When I recently upgraded to Vista, I noticed the sound quality in WoW went way down, ESPECIALLY when 5 boxing. Lots of popping and crackling and skipping etc. I have an Audigy 2 sound card and did not have this problem in XP, and in Vista I had installed the latest vista 64 compatible drivers available on creative's website, this did not fix the issue.

After googling for awhile, I found out that Creative acknowledged the problem and claimed it couldn't be fixed and the only solution was to upgrade to a newer sound card that really didn't have any additional features (X-Fi series). Upon googling some more I found out there was a guy in Brazil that goes by "Daniel_K" that re-engineered the Vista audio driver for the sound blaster audigy series and fixed the sound issues. He was later sued by Creative and forced to take down his drivers even though he wasn't trying to sell them or anything.

Fortunately, the drivers are still floating around the internet. Happy to say I found them last night, installed them over my existing sound blaster drivers, and I no longer have any sound quality issues in WoW. I have no idea where I got the drivers but I saved the rar file I downloaded and uploaded it to my website to host for others that may have the same issue. Once you extract the rar file theres just a setup.exe file in the directory - run that and it runs the standard creative software installation including add-on software which you can skip or install - at least 1 of the pieces of software will error saying its not compatible with vista 64 but everything else works fine. Enjoy and hopefully this helps some other people out!

http://www.vonderbecke.net/files/SBA..._15_0004EQ.rar

[Fuzzyboy]

Creative is becoming famous for not upgrading drivers in order to sell more products. I got the same reply from creative when trying to install my creative webcam (a fairly expensive model too) on vista. No drivers on the website and no native support in vista. Turns out that by some simple copy/pasting of the right files into the right directories it works just fine. Odd business strategy - I haven't bought Creative products since then.

[Ziran]

I ditched creative over their lousy drivers as well. I switched to HT-OMEGA sound cards (CLARO) and never looked back.

Ziran