On 2004-11-27 08:59, alexlotta wrote:
The answer i think is that:
Or you use pc JUST for music ,or the Creamwares-Drivers first or late will go crazy with something else on your pc.
I don't know how much of that is the Creamware driver's fault, and how much is Windows flaking out

(I won't mention the SBLive cuz I don't want to get into the whole Creative thing

.) My other hardware's drivers are just as prone to crash (actually, kinda more heh) than my Creamware cards's DS/WDM/whatnot driver.
Anyway, I have no problems (meaning, about 1 crash a week, machine can stay open for 2-3 days) here with XP, 2 Creamware boards and another soundcard, even after a year or two of the same XP install. The most problems I've had was with certain games. I've put back an older souncard in there, and it turns out the game crashes just as much with that card

.
The few BSOD I've had involved KMixer.sys, which is Windows' mixer thingy. I've never, ever had it happen when using ASIO. Freezes yes (rare, but happens

), but no BSOD.
But that's what you get for using PCs

. Some hardware combination works on some motherboards, freaks out on some other boards, sometimes some drivers, that work flawlessly otherwise, get in conflict and start crashing stuff, etc. Put something in this PCI slot instead of this other PCI slot, and things stop (or start) crashing. Subsequent installs of the same OS on the same hardware might even behave differently! Not to mention the introduction of new technology and protocols (ACPI, HT, stuff) that sometimes need some time to mature out OS and driver wise, etc, etc.
It's the downside of the cheaper-lots-more-available hardware-orgy that makes up the PC world. Also the fact that the main Operating System vendor doesn't sell hardware to run the OS on, and doesn't really care wether your audio gets there on time or wether the DirectSoundMumuche audio interface is consistant and stable and well documented.
And since the OS isn't open source, the vendor can't provide you with an OS patch (don't mean driver here) that fixes some of those problems
Try asking Microsoft to open up their interfaces implementation a bit, so that vendors can produce better drivers and tweak out weird bugs, see if they perform better and are more responsive than Creamware
Agreed that the Creamware marketing is a bit dodgy, for sure

But I'd rather have dodgy marketing than dodgy hardware myself, heh. Also, I thought giving out the free SDK was a pretty nice we-appreciate-your-business kind of gesture. I'll take weird signal dev over 10$ off plugins anytime

. I know how much "similar" DSP-dev tools cost (say Matlab/Simulink licence (ick) + LyrTech style DSP-in-a-box thingy,) and believe, I know what an incredible deal I'm getting!
So, yes, obviously, if XP works well at first and then starts to flake out, something gets broken along the way. I found that if I minimize the amount of processes running and keep things fairly clean, I won't get that much crashing. Not using cracked software also helps alot
Also Alex, what part of the SFP manual do you find lacking/would like to see more developped? I've found them pretty complete myself, I can think of a few other things (*cough*SDK*cough*

) with far sparser documentation. I've found that with the SFP doc and musicxp.net, you can get a pretty fast stable system with very few glitches.