Creative backtracks over Daniel_K’s modded drivers

Posted at: 5:35am 4th April 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Daniel_K’s forum posts are reinstated, and the company promises to now do a ‘better job’ of working with third party driver developers

After facing a huge backlash from the Web community this week after Creative launched a crackdown on Daniel Kawakami’s (also known as Daniel_K) modded Sound Blaster drivers, the company has now backtracked on its previous position.

Daniel_K’s previous posts, some of which linked to his driver downloads, have now been reinstated, and Creative has posted an explanation on its forums. The statement says: ‘We have read the strong feedback about Creative's forum post regarding driver development by Daniel_k and other outside parties.’ The company also admitted that ‘outside developers have been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our Sound Blaster products, and we do support and appreciate these efforts.’

Further down, the statement also claimed that ‘the huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products.’ After the original threats to Daniel_K backfired massively, the company now says that it is ‘committed to doing a better job of working more closely with third parties to support their development for our products and our customers.’

However, it looks as this may be too late for Daniel_K to keep providing his modded drivers. On a separate forum thread, Daniel_K explained that he won’t be ‘releasing a patch to enable DDL on any X-Fi,’ and that he won’t be enabling the Crystalizer on Audigy cards either. ‘As they've pointed out to me,’ says Daniel, ‘providing an alternative for their customers is good for them and [will] increase their sales, especially when someone is doing it for free. Given the current situation, I cannot let this happen.’

In his conversations with Creative, Daniel said that Creative had at least promised that an updated Audigy driver will eventually be released. He also added that he’d turned down the offer of a free X-Fi 2, as he was already ‘getting a couple of cards from other companies that contacted me.’ It looks as though other sound card manufacturers have recognised the value of having regular driver updates.