TECHBLOGG: New $US9.99 software package restores special audio features to Audigy cards – but should consumers be paying for it?

When Microsoft released Windows Vista, one of its less discussed issues was the complete change to the audio engine within DirectX. Basically, the audio engine was no longer part of DirectX. And with that change, many sound cards that worked perfectly well in Windows XP now no longer worked in Windows Vista.

While most cards and integrated motherboard audio solutions worked in a basic sense, Creative’s Audigy line of sound cards would no longer work correctly and their high-end collection of ear-candy known as EAX sound effects, the ability to handle 3D audio and do on the fly sample rate conversion went out the window.

Spool forward five months and Creative is now offering a patch that fixes these issues on a select number of DirectX games and on most Audigy-class sound cards.

However, it comes at a price of $US9.99.

The big question this raises is should consumers be forced to pay for software that fixes something that Microsoft broke in the first place?

It’s no secret that despite Microsoft’s promise of some 14,000 driver tools shipped with the release of Windows Vista, there are plenty of peripheral devices that are in desperate need of driver software.

These range from my Creative Sound Blast Extigy card through colour laser printers I’ve been testing as part of an upcoming Australian PC User feature.

However, this is the first time we’ve seen a vendor charge for a software patch and if you’re a computer user, you should be worried by this development - for if one peripheral vendor tries it on for size, what’s to stop say the likes of HP or Canon doing the same for their inkjet printers? Or any vendor doing it in the future?

It raises the question of how much support should consumers expect from a peripherals vendor? Does the vendor have an expectation to support the device with driver software for 12 months? Three years? Should they support every operating system released in that time frame?

There’s no doubt that given the extreme changes to audio Microsoft has undertaken with Vista that sound card developers have had to do some major software development to make older products work. Should they be fairly compensated for that work? I think the answer has to be ‘yes’ otherwise, it becomes an unviable cost to the business.

The two options vendors face are they either charge for the updates or they build a future-proof surcharge into every new product.

But every bad-news story needs to have someone to blame and the most obvious villain in this piece is Microsoft. Windows Vista has become an underwhelming upgrade, so much so that even the likes of Dell, which normally walks in-step with Microsoft, has had to listen to the cries of consumers and continue offering Windows XP as an operating system option on new PCs.

And in the end, Microsoft’s changes to Windows Vista are so great, at least in terms of audio, that they will simply encourage many users to stick with Windows XP. Sure, they may miss some of the whiz-bang eye-candy that is supposed to be DirectX10 but given we still haven’t seen any DirectX10 games as yet, it’s hardly anything to cry over.

But as for payware driver updates, Creative Labs is venturing into new and turbulent waters but I suspect given the user-pays nature of corporate computing, it won’t be the last.

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3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."