Creative Audigy 2 Zs

[Theo Pontbriand]

Iwas planning to upgrade to 32-bit Windows 7 and I tested it on my M1530. Everything worked fine except this "Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Advanced MB". It installs fine but the Creative Audio Center does not run and tells me it can not find any supported device. I have tried installing it in Vista compatibility mode too.

p.s. "Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Advanced MB" is a software based solution and not my sound card drivers. Creative does not provide free updates for this on their website. It is for Dell to provide the update to their customers.

Since the Vista based drivers for the Sigmatel hardware are working fine under windows 7, the problem can be that Creative SB Audigy Advanced MB can not determined if the device is supported or not, probably due to a small change in the signature of the driver file under windows 7. It requires a small patch to fix this.

The sister product "Creative Sound Blaster X-fi MB" now has a patch that makes it possible to run it under 64-bit Windows 7. Dell has included this patch in their upgrade kit and the users who are eligible can use the kit to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 and X-fi MB works for them. Why are they not releasing a similar patch for Audigy Advance MB?

I have exactly the same problem on aDell XPS 430 system: After upgrading from vista to windows 7 the "Soundblaster Audigy advanced MB" software could be installed from CD and also activated with the Creative license key, but the creative audio center aborts with "cannot find supported devices".

I reported this to the Dell eMail-Support, but their only reaction was that they sent me a contact of the "Presto"-software service which involves costs. Some years ago there were the same problem with audigy when migrating from XP to Vista. At that time Dell delivered an upgrada package at no charge. So it should be up to Dell to delivere a patch also in this case.

Addendum:

1. The "Presto"-software service gave me the information, that there will be no patch from Creative oder Dell for the "Soundblaster Audigy advanced MB"-Software because of "new features" in Windows 7 (without specifying these features).

Yeah, not only does it install and activate on windows 7, the two other utilities included, the Creative media source and Creative wave studio work fine. It is only the Creative Audio Center that does not work. Since it is the Audio Center that has the EAX effects, equalizer and enhancements etc, so it is what matters to me.

This is most likely just a licensing issue. All Dell needs to do it to issue a small patch. Unfortunately, they will not do that unless people demand from them. I called Dell phone line about a month ago but they recommended I go to Creative website to download the windows 7 drivers. They just don't seem to understand that this is a software suite and creative will not give me a free update. It is upto Dell to convince creative to issue a patch. After 20 minutes I ended the call. I will try the email route now and see what happens.

We appreciate you writing to Creative Technical Support regarding your

Audigy ADVANCED MB in Windows 7. However, we're sorry to inform you

that currently, Audigy ADVANCED MB does not support Windows 7.

Creative is working constantly on updates for Windows 7 users who are

using Creative products. These updates will be delivered from time to

time on our website.

In the meantime, you may contact Dell for further assistance.

Thank you for reaching us at Creative Technical Support; we appreciate

the opportunity to assist you.

This software was created for Dell. So, Dell would have to pay them to create a patch. The question is do they care to do so in order to remain in good standing with customers. Apparently the same thing happened when people upgraded from XP to Vista. An upgraded version needed to be produced.

Dell hasn't even released win 7 compatible audio drivers for Sigmatel hardware, so to expect them to fix audigy advanced mb is asking too much. Since they have nothing to gain financially from supporting laptops that have sigmatel and audigy advanced mb, as the sales have already been made, I am guessing they will not bother about it. It is shame that even though my XPS M1530 is fully compatible with win 7, I am unable to install win 7 on it because of these audio problems.

I friend of mine told me that Dell will probably release win 7 updates after Feb 2010 for their older systems as they want people to buy new win 7 pre-installed laptops during this end of year season. Some people will not buy new PCs if their older ones were made fully compatible with win 7. He told me that with audigy a similar thing happened when Vista was released and it took Dell almost 1 year to release the Vista compatible version of audigy advanced MB. So, perhaps in a year time we will get a win 7 version of audigy.

Ok, I've just installed windows 7 x64, and the same problem... to the moment, no patch from dell nor from creative... The audio drivers though, they are running well. Let's hope dell releases something soon.

then - if you simply install the Sigmatel audio drivers of your soundcard (i took the ones supllied by dell on they support.dell.com website - current version for xps m1530 is A03) restart and after that install Audigy Advance MB - it will work just fine.

"We do not support OEM product. You can only contact with Dell for possible driver update for Windows 7. However, on our end we do not have any available driver for Windows 7 to work with Sound Blaster Audigy Advanced MB."

Yea - seems like. I just tried Creative Audio Center on my PC (whic i did not after installing the application) and doesn't work - although just like for you, there is sound and the volume panel works ok.

I recently got a new computer (Dell Dimension 8400) with a Creative Labs SoundBlaster Audigy LS sound card. Having had Arch Linux on my other machine, naturally I wanted to install it on this computer as well (Arch is just that good). Unfortunately, I have had nothing but trouble getting this particular machine to cooperate. Thus far, I have overcome many difficulties with the help of the Wiki and this forum. However, this one has me stopped cold:

Each of which gave me an error. For whatever reason, I decided to reboot and try again. This time I was able to modprobe all of them just fine. I then continued with the instructions and tried to run alsamixer (as root), which gave me the following error:

The harddrive is SATA, RAID level 0, but I had to disable RAID in the BIOS in order to install Arch. I have to enable/disable it each time I want to switch booting between Windows XP and Arch, which is annoying--but that's a different question altogether.

Having seen somewhere that the audigyls driver is to be replaced by the ca0106 driver, I tried to get that driver working, but couldn't get alsa-driver 1.0.7 to configure --with-cards=ca0106. I tried the cvs version of alsa-driver and got it to configure and install, but I was unable to modprobe snd-ca0106 (modprobe ca0106 didn't work either).

jesus man, you are using hotplug i assume!

try to disable hotplug in the daemons array, and reboot, this means that you also must put your usb modules in the modules array,

uhci-hcd and ehci-hcd ,

Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!

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A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.

When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!

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