Creative Labs Open-Sources the X-Fi Soundblaster Specifications

Creative Labs has recently provided open source driver developers with documentation and sample code for the Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card released back in August 2005. The main reason for divulging the technical specifications is the fact that the company has not managed yet to fully develop open-source drivers.

Prior to the event, Creative refused to release the sound blaster's technical sheet and attempted to develop a proprietary Linux driver in-house. The attempt was a fiasco even since it released a rudimentary beta driver back in September 2007. It used to work with X86-64 kernels only, compiled with older versions of the GCC.

The company refused to provide the open-source community with documentation for the X-Fi cards until now, given the fact that the Sound Blaster X-Fi sound cards are completely different in design than Creative's earlier Audigy family of PC audio hardware. The times are changing, though, as in early February, on the release of Open Sound System (OSS) 4.0 build 1013, 4Front Technologies outlined a limited support for Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi cards.

The beta version of the above-mentioned driver is able to play an audio stream, yet it encounters tremendous errors while recording sound, from both analog and digital sources. The released source code comes with some files that are used by OSS (Open Sound System) drivers, and they are comprised of hardware control code programmed by Creative itself.

OSS has lost much of its glitter over the last years, and now about all the Linux distributions are using the drivers developed by ALSA Project. Moreover, these drivers are part of the last kernel versions. Creative is also partly involved with the ALSA project, but according to Alsa developer James Courtier-Dutton, the Creative Labs has not sent yet any data sheets regarding the technical specifications for the Sound Blaster X-Fi cards.