Bundles of joy

Reviews and comparisons tend to get sticky when it comes to software bundles. People either consider the bundle a huge benefit incentive, or an unnecessary waste of polyacrylics and money. Those who care about the whole package need look no further than the SBLive. Creative has packed 3 CDs full of utilities, demos, and programs for distribution with the Live. For your $199, you get an EAX-enhanced version of Unreal, Sound Forge XP 4.0, Cakewalk Express Gold, Mixman Studios, and Creative's own suite of desktop and audio applications. These include Play Center, the Creative Launcher, AudioHQ, Prody Parrot, Rhythmania, Creative WaveStudio, Keytar, 2, 4, and 8MB E-mu wavetable patches, and the Sound Blaster Live Tour and Demo. As with all software bundles, I found some programs useful, and others not so useful. The applications I really didn't care for - Prody Parrot and Cakewalk Express I have no interest in using. The included utilities however, have become a somewhat permanent addition to my desktop. The Creative Launcher is like a Start Menu that autohides at the top of your screen, and provides easy access to the rest of the Creative applications (and is customizable to any application set you wish), such as Environmental Audio controls, Creative's own Live mixer, and Speaker/Soundfont controls.

Diamond took a slightly more modest approach, providing the drivers needed to get the card up and running, a control panel/system tray applet which allows you to adjust various settings (equivalent to the Live's AudioHQ), and a suite of core applications focusing more on Internet and tech-savvy gamers. You get Half Life Day One and Recoil for games, an MP3 encoding/decoding/database program called Music Match Jukebox, Midiworks 98, Midisoft Studio Recording Session, a host of A3D 2.0 demos, a 10-band graphic equalizer (which an Aureal spokesman at Comdex touted highly but I couldn't care less about) and Zoran SoftDVD with analog AC-3 support.

Anyone already on the net is either running Sonique or Winamp, and can download an easy-to-use MP3 ripper that puts the Music Match program to shame. I only mention this because a few hasty webmasters didn't fully read the MX300 announcement and posted that the MX300 hardware-accelerated the MP3 encoding/decoding process (which it doesn't). For those who have a DVD player, the biggest difference in the software features available for the SBLive and the MX300 is SoftDVD with AC-3 support. The Zoran software will decode DVD Mpeg2 and Dolby AC-3 audio on the CPU (it's a pretty processor-intensive process, and isn't as clean as a hardware solution), and virtualize the 5.1 output to 2 or 4 speakers through the MX300. This is the easy way to get surround for whatever DVD player you happen to be using. While Creative doesn't currently support DVD decoding, it does have an internal Molex header for "I2S." What you can do with that is hook up Creative's PC-DVD solution (it includes a hardware card to decode Mpeg2 and AC-3) and connect it directly to the SBLive for a pure digital pass to the Live's DAC. Currently only stereo support through the SBLive is available, but Creative's next generation of PC-DVD (after the Drx5) will support full 4-speaker and HRTF surround setups. Personally, if I were to buy a DVD-ROM drive, I would go for the Creative PC-DVD, and not worry about processor-sapping software decoding at all. For those wishing to save a little money (or a PCI slot), Micah mentioned that Creative was working with Zoran SoftDVD, and might include it as a Liveware! update in the future - each Dolby Digital channel would be rendered into a DirectSound 3D stream and sent to the appropriate speaker for full surround support.