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If you haven't read my previous article titled "Creative Labs commits PR suicide", you should do that first and then come back here.

Creative's forum moderator Dale-CL has started a new thread titled "A message from Creative to the Sound Blaster forum participants". What follows is my reply to Creative's message:

Creative's message posted on our behalf by our Company spokesperson tried to address our concern about the improper distribution of certain software which is the property of other companies.

Such as? You cannot claim IP violation without citing specific IP which has been violated.

However, we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties.

Like how? As far as I remember Creative has never supported open-source community by providing enough details to implement equivalent functionality such as found in Windows XP in other non-Microsoft operating systems.

The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products.

Stories for the (very small) children. You have unified drivers. It means there is no separate development needed for those older products to work as they did in Windows XP.

Let me be clear on this one, owners of those older cards such as Audigy 2 are not asking for unreasonable things. All we want is to have the same features (equalizer, mixer, karaoke, hardware MIDI, EAX effects, CMSS, time scaling, Dolby and DTS decoding, etc) in Windows XP x64 and Windows Vista as we already had in Windows XP. Disabling those features on purpose and reducing our hardware to basic functionality is unfair to say the least.

Finally, let me say that if X-Fi didn't have snap/crackle/pop issues and problematic drivers with shady Windows XP x64 and Vista support I would have been the first person to buy one. There would be no need to force upgrade on me by crippling the functionality of my existing Audigy 2 ZS card.

Since in the meantime PCI has become legacy interface, I will not be purchasing PCI cards anymore. Instead I suggest you to start making native PCI-Express sound card with a DSP and a decent set of drivers for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. Once you offer that I will be the first in line to get one.

We hope to work out a mutually agreeable method for working with Daniel_k in supporting his efforts in driver development.

That is what you should have done in the first place. We want to see some resignations posted here — Mr. Phil should go as well as alll those from the upper management who told him what to write. That is the only way we could believe in what you are saying again.

Going forward, we are committed to doing a better job of working more closely with third parties to support their development for our products and our customers.

That is what you have said in the past many times but failed to deliver. We need a proof. And we want it fast this time, like days, not weeks or months.

To summarize, response has come too late — we do not see any commitment, no schedule, no plans laid out, not even an apology on official Creative Labs website.

In the meantime, Daniel has participated in an email interview and he explained what he did wrong. On the other hand, Creative Labs still haven't admitted their wrong-doing. We want to see that admission, an apology, and a sound plan for the future — we are not interested in more excuses. Especially not now when we already know that SB X-Fi 2 is in the works.

With SB X-Fi 2 on the horizon if Creative Labs is allowed to continue their older product crippling practice, X-Fi owners will be the next ones to lose the features they paid for just like Live 5.1, Audigy, Audigy 2, and Audigy 4 owners already did.