Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 observation

[Oyeve]

Well, I got the SBLIVE PLatinum 5.1 and love/hate it. I love the live drive, it make my system very accessable. I can record directly to my MD via optical cable, which reduces hiss greatly. The remote, while basically useless, accesses my 40 gigs of MP3s, which will come in handy when I throw a party and can control my music without being at my desk. My only real problem is this: I have a dual boot system, w2k and winme. The w2k is on a seperate drive. No programs are shared between winme and w2k. I installed all the SB software in both OSes and all works except the MD stuff in winme. I keep getting an error saying something about "albums.svr" not working properly. Well, being that it works fine in w2k I decided to copy and paste from the w2k install to the winme install. Even though the file sizes and versions were different it worked! I still dont know why the win9x version doesnt work and of course a call to creative was useless but I am happy it all works regardless. Does anyone know what encoder creatives uses for encoding mp3s with playcenter 2? It sounds decent enough but I used to use Fraunhofer and the creative encoder encodes slightly faster.

 

[TheManiac]

Just out of curiosity, have you had any problems with the RemoteCenter under Win2k? It seems like when ever I install certain programs (Unreal, Quake) the RemoteCenter will crash on startup. But then if I reinstall the SB software, everything is fine again. Sounds like a DLL problem to me, but I'm just curious if you've ran into this?

 

[Oyeve]

No, cant say that I have. Just the problems with MD center.

 

[Daniel]

I've had problems with remote center crashing as well, also a weird thing with the live drive, if I leave it plugged in and windows boots the windows startup sound plays over the speakers but then the rest of them are through the headphones, sure I could just disable the startup sound but I did find it odd.

 

[mosdef]

Oyeve - From your post, how can you say you hate it? You had one minor problem that you fixed and you said you are happy.

-mosdef

 

[TheManiac]

Did you ever fix the crashing problem? Or does it just happen randomly? And also, do you know of any program that will let the remote center control winamp? Or maybe there is a way to configure the remote center to do that?

 

[Oyeve]

Mosdef, I hate it for the fact that I HAD to fix it.

 

[mosdef]

TheManiac - I know there are some remote control plugins for Winamp. I'm not sure if they work with the Platinum 5.1, but it doesn't hurt to do some research.

-mosdef