kx Driver on SoundBlaster Live

Hello,

I know that people here are not too found about Creative soundcards. But a long time ago when I was a very young and innocent boy I thought that the best soundcard for my recordings would be a SoundBlaster. I'm now in the process of understanding many concepts for getting a real soundcard for recording music.
 
But for now I still have my Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 with a Live! Drive that I use to do my recordings with AA 2.0. The most annoying thing is that with all the inputs I can only record one at a time.  But now I came across the kX Driver http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/. It replaces the native Creative drivers to ones with ASIO support which gives me independent access to all inputs for recording. Although I haven't done any recording, I have installed it and checked that on AA I now have all inputs available to do multitrack recording.

Does anyone has some experiencing with this driver? I'd like to know some opinions about it.

Cheers

Until I retired my Win98SE system recently I was using the kx drivers with its Creative Platinum card, and although it worked ok I could never begin to understand the driver's control panel and features.  The most simple thing seemed to require endless fiddling with several badly designed interface pages.

Or maybe I'm just dumb.

For a couple of years I used two SB live cards with the kx drivers and CE 1.2a. under XP pro. It all worked fairly well for a cheap setup and I was able to learn something about recording. The kx interface finally drove me nuts. Kx does work in allowing you to run multiple SB cards, if that's what you want to do, but configuring it took so much time. Ultimately, pro equipment is the solution for a pro job and peace of mind.

Until I retired my Win98SE system recently I was using the kx drivers with its Creative Platinum card, and although it worked ok I could never begin to understand the driver's control panel and features.  The most simple thing seemed to require endless fiddling with several badly designed interface pages.

While I agree with your assessment of the kx driver's usability, I would point out that since these are consumer cards, the native Creative driver / mixer / software package was so cutesy that I found it even more incomprehensible.  While I still have that Creative card on one PC, needless to say for my serious audio machines I now use more appropriate gear.

Does anyone has some experiencing with this driver? I'd like to know some opinions about it.

Well, you are aware that we are not too fond of the Creative cards so you may know this, but I'd just like to emphasise that using the kx drivers won't change the fundamental problem (for many of us) with the cards, and that is that they only really operate at a sample rate of 48kHz.  In fact, I think the kx ASIO drivers only offer 48kHz, so you can't get this wrong.  But, be aware, that's what you are going to have to work with.

Given the basic limitation of the card, it has to be said the KX drivers are a real mess.  I've never made them work properly, they're confusing and they are as ugly as sin.

However, did you know that it's possible to use the EMU drivers with this card (it has the same EMU10K1 Chipset).  They won't do anything for your quality - that's down to the card - but they improve the functionality by a huge amount.  What I don't know if this is possible under XP, it certainly was a good 'fix' for 98.

I never got my head around the KX interface either, tho I DID make a solo acoustic recording just using the KX 3537 driver with a PCI512 card, 'verb and all.

All in all tho, the developer has created a driver for the 10k chip that makes it useable for low latency recording, and as a poor home studio owner I am thankful for all his hard work. Because of that I could get a few years of recording under my belt before moving up in the world.

So even tho the drivers are totally unfriendly for the most part, they do work quite well IMHO....

I have two soundcards, one of them a SB Live (with Live Drive) that I use for games, MP3's and other sounds (the other soundcard is a Hoontech/STaudio DSP 24VE which I use for vinyl to cd purposes). The KX drivers never failed to give me troubles; after initial installation they are just fine, but after a period of use they become unstable, giving no sounds at all, or changing the default soundcard in Windows from SB to the other one. I never found the exact cause of this, although I do suspect the KX drivers to be incompatible with the drivers for the Hoontech. After switching back to the original Windows XP drivers from Microsoft (I had also bad experiences with the Creative drivers) those problems were over.

I found the configuration panel fairly straightforward, although certainly not user friendly.