SB Live Value: How do I upgrade drivers?

[Caveman]

SB Lives website FAQ cover all areas except the obvious: How does one actually "install" a new driver for their soundcard? Maybe I'm making this too difficult but I'm nearly fanatical about goofing up my system so I always proceed with extreme caution when changing anything.

I know that PROPER video driver installation isn't something to be done with reckless abandon (must remove old driver residue, change settings, etc...), and I assume sound card driver updating is similar.

Can anyone tell me how driver installation is done with a SB Live Value Soundcard? Any hints tips, or outright instructions -- SBlives webpage is silent here...

Incidently, my reason for Driver upgrading is so I can use Roger Wilco software for flight simulation as well as hopefully fix a CTD with the game "Thief" after mission 4.

 

[office boy]

Er.. you run the executable.

 

[Caveman]

That's it????

So this is NOT like upgrading video drivers? Much less involved? Sounds good to me...

 

[office boy]

Yes, very simple....

 

[gtd2000]

It's supposed to be that simple - but it wasn't - I downloaded several "executable" updates all of which did nothing at all to update my drivers in anyway. I did manage to get one from the Creative site in the UK which worked as it is supposed to - that was for my mums TNT card.
I cannot get the updated SB Live drivers to update automatically...

 

[Caveman]

Not what I wanted to hear although I wonder about the validity of your statement as I don't think there's a TNT Soundcard -- don't you mean video???

Anyway...

This is a curious thing I think most people would be interested in. Updating drivers can't be "that hard"...

Can it?

Anyone else with some me helpful info? Thanks in advance.

 

[thorin]

Been there, done that a few times. It's just the executable.

Thorin

 

[Niege]

As I recall, when I upgraded to Livewire 3 the executable came up with the strong suggestion to uninstall Livewire 2 before running Livewire 3 installation. It seems that LW contains the whole package of drivers and value added software. So I shut down the installation, uninstalled Livewire 2 and then ran LW3. No problems.

 

[office boy]

Yes, But liveware isn't the creative driver package either...

 

[gtd2000]

two parts to my answer - one for VDO, one for sound - both Creative "executables" - VDO worked (after several downloads from different sites) but the sound didn't.....

 

[Caveman]

Then what is it...?

The way it reads on the SB webpage makes it appear that LW3 does include a driver package...

I knew there were no easy answers : )

I hope someone can shed some light on this...

 

[Caveman]

To avoid confusion,

I my last post, GTD2000 posted same instant as myself... I was trying to "answer" office boys short post above...

 

[AL77]

While I don't recall seeing an established procedure for updating the Live series cards on Creative's various sites, I have always just run either the stand-alone (5.42MB) executable (which is supposed to unpack itself and install the drivers, more on this below) or unzipped the Liveware package (28.8MB), and then run the setup.exe from the unzipped archive.

Issues
1. While I didn't have a problem installing LiveWare 3.0 on a Live Value (original), I ran (IIRC) into one of those "file being copied is older than the file on your computer" messages when installing LiveWare 3.0 on a friend's system with a Live Value 2.0 Digital, I believe I just kept the old (i.e. newer) file. I believe the file in question was related to the joystick port. This was on freshly formatted system and both systems were using Win98SE...strange.

2. Recently, on a freshly formatted Win98SE system using the original Live Value, I installed only the 5.42MB driver package (LiveWare applications wear off their novelty after a while). You're just supposed to click the .exe as previously mentioned, but I kept getting an error right after you agree to the software license which would abort the installation. After a couple of times doing this, I unpacked the .exe file into a directory using Winzip, and I ran the setup.exe file contained within it manually. This did work.

So, for me anyway, it wasn't just as straightforward as clicking the .exe. I don't know why Creative hasn't looked into this.

Additional: Both the stand-alone driver package and LiveWare 3.0 contain the drivers (although the drivers in the LiveWare 3.0 package are older which I think give problems with the Coppermine processors). So if you're not installing LiveWare, you will not have any applications, even the speaker setup app seems to be missing. As I only have two speakers, I don't need to configure my speakers really, but it's strange that you don't have even basic options in the driver set.

 

[Subversal]

What is the date of the driver file? Mine states a 10/7/1999 date.. even after I ran the .exe Is that the correct date... seems a little old.

 

[tjdavis1138]

Here comes a stupid question: What is livewire?

I recently purchased a SBLive Value 1024 and just installed the drivers from the cd.

 

[Vinny N]

If you installed most of the software from the CD, you probably installed Liveware.
It includes a bunch of programs for environmental audio, management of soundfonts for MIDI playback, and 2/4 speaker setup.
It's not too bad but unless you're interested in one of the above, you don't need it and would do just as well to install the plain old single excutable driver update from the CL website.

 

[Philly C]

LiveWare is basically software apps for the SB Live. It includes like this audio station thing that lets you configure how many speakers you have, mixer settings, and EAX settings. I bought my Live Value OEM so there was no documentation and I had to figure out most of it but it's pretty simple. I'm still confused as to what the sensitivity slider does in the AutoEAX app.

 

[AL77]

Subversal, I installed the latest drivers (not liveware) just a couple of weeks ago after a fresh format.
Under the driver tab for Device Manager --> Sound, video and game controllers --> Creative SB Live! Value --> Properties shows:

Creative SB Live! Value
Provider: Creative
Date: 08/26/1999

...which doesn't correspond to 05/05/2000 date on the driver download page, but it works.

Edit: I also noticed that SB 16 Emulation does not show an IRQ used under its properties, nor does it show up in the general IRQ allocation under Device Manager. I seem to recall that it did before.