I installed this card in a brand new custom PC. I was very excited to have such a device, as I am into music creation and recording. The installation went fairly well. However, there was a problem with the joystick port which I only managed to fix recently.

It is great to have the Live Drive I/O interface. For the money, I can't really complain too much about it. It lets you do many things. I wish that it had RCA outs, however.

SoundFont support is wonderful. This is truly a great feature.

The manual is terrible. If you want to work on music creation, check out some of the Soundblaster Live user groups on the web.

Now, while the I/O board is nice, and the sound quality is quite good, this card isn't for professional musicians. The MIDI levels are pretty low, and the some of the outputs generate a bit of noise. Also, the "record what you hear" function is nice, you will have noticable buzzing and level problems if you try to simultaneously play and record MIDI. In other words, you really need a separate synth module if you want to record midi. This makes it a little harder to justify the cost of the card.

The sad thing is that it is commonly reported on user groups that a different driver is available for (illegal) use with the Soundblaster Live that really brings it up to par with "professional" music-making cards. I don't understand why Soundblaster doesn't update the drivers. I assume that they just want you to have to buy a new card every two years. They even cancelled a program called LiveWare, by which they were supposedly going to give you free significant upgrades. Sounds pretty fishy to me.

The WORST part of the Soundblaster Live is the customer support. Creative has some major issues. The site at soundblaster.com looks nice and all, but it is difficult to navigate. It gave me repeated error messages over several weeks when I chose my opperating system and product name to check for driver updates. The website also says you can order a software update, but gives you no clue on how to do so.

I finally called the place. I was on hold for 30 minutes before I hung up. The computerized on-hold announcements kept telling me to check out the website for help.

After hanging up, I decided that I would e-mail creative. If you ever try this, I hope you're patient. You have to wind through several, if not dozens, of pages and forms just to submitt a question. They obviously want to talk to as few of their customers as possible.

A few days later, I received an e-mail reply which didn't really answer my questions. They answered one of several questions at best, and in a round-a-bout way at that.

I simply can't recommend ANY creative products because of the poor customer support. It is too bad, because they do make nice products.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 180.00