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Creative Finally Open-Source their X-Fi Driver

by Chinmoy Kanjilal | Translate | Print
Saturday, 07th Nov 2009 | Share






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Has anyone used the Sound Blaster X-Fi driver from Creative Labs? The driver was full of bugs and was always a step behind the Windows releases. Other open source drivers with support for the Creative X-Fi were also stagnant in development.

Finally, Creative saw it was going nowhere with this policy and open-sourced this driver’s code. The code is available under the GNU GPLv2 License now.

The first X-Fi driver for Linux was released in September 2007 but was for 64 bit only. No 32 bit driver came out for a long time after that. This April saw another beta release which comes almost after a year and a half. With the code being open-sourced, we now expect to see a more regular release cycle. The driver is 13,000 lines in size and has a big limitation of external I/O modules. The driver is capable of ALSA PCM playback, ALSA recording and mixing.

The Linux version of the X-Fi driver has been named Creative XFiDrv 1.00. Though, far from perfect this time as well ( The driver causes a problem in the Fedora 9 Kernel) , the driver is open to open-source developers which comes as a big relief.

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Author: Chinmoy Kanjilal

I am a blogger from Kolkata, India and have a passion for computers and programming. I am also a web2.0 enthusiast, java enthusiast, programmer, blogger and a student of engineering.

Chinmoy Kanjilal has written 180 articles for us.

The author of this post can be contacted at chinmoy@techie-buzz.com

2 Responses so far | Leave Your Comments

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  1. taranfx
    November 7th, 2009 at 1:52 pm #

    this is a great news, now finally we can tweak the driver, which is crappy on Windows 7. I use my Creative Xfi 5.1 USB with my Z5500 for an amazing sound. checkout my review of this soundcard.

    Reply to this comment

    chinmoy Reply:
    November 28th, 2009 at 12:34 am

    Nice review there. I have not tried the driver on Windows 7. Do not have that hardware with any friends or myself.

    Reply to this comment





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