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Sound Blaster Live Platinum 5.1

Dec 14, 2006 WinXP, techno-babble

If you have a SB Live Platinum 5.1 with the IR Drive in front and you got it when the CD that came with the sound card had only Win 98 drivers, well then you are like me! Everytime you need to do a reinstall of Win XP (and you know, this thing happens more than you can ever imagine) then you know that it’s a pain! Install all the software from the CD first, while Win XP gives you all kind of errors about the software not passing their so called quality tests, etc.

I’ll give you a simple solution to do that… without using the Live install CD or application CD. So what are the main components you need?
Drivers, Play-Center, Remote-Center– right?

Drivers: Creative has been kind enough to put the driver pack up on their site without requiring you to install the drivers from the CD. So download the file: Sound Blaster Live! – LiveDrvUni-Pack (English) from the Creative website for your Win XP. Click here for Live Platinum 5.1 + Windows XP combination.

Play-Center: from the same link above, download Creative PlayCenter Download for Creative Sound Blaster Live! series audio cards version 3.02.70. Now I know that their requirements say that you have to have a previous version of PlayCenter installed (which means putting in their old Application CD and upgrading and all that hassle that won’t let you do a clean install). Ignore that requirement. Make sure you have winzip 9.0 or above installed on your computer. Once the file is downloaded, right click on the file and extract it to a directory that you know. After the files have extracted, navigate to the directory. In there, you will see a directory called “install”. Open the “install” directory and look for a file called Version.ini. Edit the file with Notepad or your favourite text editor (which for me happens to be gVim).

Towards the bottom of the file will be a [VersionCompare] section like the one below.
[VersionCompare]
Lesser = 1
Equal = 1
Greater = -1

Set the listings under the [VersionCompare] section to:
Lesser = 0
Equal = 0
Greater = 0

Run the software and it won’t require a previous version being installed anymore.

For Remote Center, download the file Sound Blaster Live! – Remote Control Center (English) from the Creative site link I provided above and follow the same instructions as for the Play-Center. And if you like Creative Recorder, do exactly the same for Creative Recorder by downloading Sound Blaster Live! – Creative Recorder (English) file and changing the [VersionCompare] section in the Version.ini file.

There you have it, a clean install of all SB Live Platinum 5.1 Software and drivers.

Tags: drivers, sound blaster, sound blaster live platinum 5.1, windows xp