The total lack of support from Creative Labs to Sound Blaster Live! and Audigy users has been widely criticized, with right. In more than six months, the Singapore firm has still not released any new official driver updates for its Live! and Audigy sound cards. Thus many users are still experiencing numerous issues that affect their Creative Labs cards under Windows XP. Thankfully Compaq has today released a huge 377MB file that contains brand new WHQL certified drivers for Sound Blaster Live! and Audigy cards! The set also contains brand new updated multilanguage applications including: PlayCenter 3.01.57, RemoteCenter 1.40.21, MiniDisc Center 1.01.14, AudioHQ 1.10.21, SurroundMixer 2.00.26, Recorder 2.00.24, WaveStudio 4.21.06, and more.

The drivers set is announced to be Windows XP compatible only. I've tested it with a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum and so far it simply works great. If all the known bugs aren't fixed (especially the SoundFont ones), Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Medal Of Honnor hardware acceleration issues are fixed. Some new features have been added: the drivers support hardware acceleration through the OpenAL library and a new 3D optimized headphone mode is available. To install this driver set you need to uninstall your existing Creative Labs applications/drivers set.

When you'll have extracted the files of the archive you need to remove the file CTOEM.CFG of the setup folder, before you can launch the setup.