Constant crackling/pop + inability to install standard drivers + audio loss

Oh Lord, what a disaster Creative is. I have a Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatalty Pro that worked fine under Windows XP for four straight years. Then on the fifth year when I upgraded to the Windows 7 x64 Beta it ceased to function. It never continued to work with the Release Candidate, RTM or Retail versions so I just gave up until a few days ago when I thought maybe Creative or the community fixed some of my issues...
Hah, fat chance. Anyways it all began with severe audio distortions, pops and crackling that would sometimes end in a flat-line tone or eternal static. No matter how many times I reinstalled my drivers, used older drivers or used user remedies nothing worked. So I just gave up, took out my sound card and sucked it up with my Realtek integrated motherboard audio (eugh).
Well I can't stand it anymore. I'm too much of an audiophile to settle for anything less so I tried my sound card out again. I still had the same problems only now I can barely install any Creative drivers as the installation will constantly ask about a file called layout.bin.[url="http://consumerdocs.installshield.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=Q0892&sliceId=" rel="nofollow"> I followed this solution[/url] but it does not work at all and there are no other responses on the issue.
But that's OK because I can still install the base X-Fi drivers. Unfortunately it never resolved my issue. Older drivers do not work. There's nothing other than crackling and popping and then an utter loss of audio. Then I heard about Daniel_K and used his drivers (X-Fi Prelude Beta and X-Fi Support Pack 2.0). I was elated when everything installed without a single issue and the audio was perfect... until after maybe an hour when the crackling came back. Then it started getting progressi'vely worse until you can't even decipher what's being heard. I tried a couple reinstalls which would fix the issue for a short spell but then it'd degrade exponentially from there.
On top of that I couldn't use any of the Creative software with either Creative's drivers or Daniel_K's. It would never detect my sound card even though Windows had no problem seeing it. So I spent literally 5 hours of my day prowling these forums, Google and my own experiments with no luck.
So rather than looking for a solution I'm just gonna ask for one. I have an EVGA 680i motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3GHz, ATI Radeon HD 5850, 6GB RAM, Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatalty Pro and .5TB HDD space.
I know Creative stated that nForce motherboards might have an issue with the X-Fi but I've never had that problem with XP and I heard it's found in many other boards from different manufacturers. Creative also stated problems with more than 4GB of RAM but I've disabled all but 3.5GB of RAM with no success. I know Creative states that this is a PCI issue and that I should mess around with my BIOS settings. Updating my BIOS, disabling unneeded BIOS features, changing PCI slots and getting rid of my overclocks did nothing.
I [b][u]KNOW[/u][/b] that it's [color="#ff0000"]not a defecti've card. Everything works 00% with Ubuntu 9.0. Thanks for your time. I'm probably just wishing for gold to pour from the heavens and wasting my time. =(

ORe: Constant crackling/pop + inability to install standard drivers + audio loss? Alright, don't ask me how but I managed to mostly fix my crackling and popping issue. I fixed it with a combination of rearranging all of my hardware to different slots and reinstalling my drivers for the th time, only this time mashing Daniel_K's drivers with Creative's.
Now getting the drivers to work is another thing. I have sound and it's superb (the only reason why I'm willing to sacrifice so much of my time to get this to work) but I cannot get any other function out of my X-Fi. I can't open up the console, switch modes, enable effects, etc. Also, if I ATTEMPT to screw around with any audio settings my computer will start crackling like the devil and all of my hard work will be undone, prompting another reinstall requiring the utter removal of anything Creative on my PC to work.
Now I think the reason for this is because whenever I try to install any Creative software from Creative themselves (except the driver) it won't install. It will ask about a layout.bin, I would point the installation to where layout.bin is but then it'd give me an error (Error I-00). According to my install.log I'm missing something called CTShared. I try installing it but it doesn't seem to fix my problem.
Also, installing ALchemy will tell me that it couldn't create a shortcut after installation and will not work. Sometimes the installation will say that there is a newer version of a product and that it won't install even though there is no trace of anything Creative on my computer.
Now Daniel_K's drivers and software install fine, but the software WILL NOT detect my sound card. It will constantly tell me that the audio device wasn't found or that it's not installed. Windows sees it fine, though, and I get perfect audio. So I mashed Daniel_K's drivers with Creative (long process) and everything installs fine, everything looks to run fine but for some reason nothing will start up. So so much for my own modding attempts. >_<
Any solutions?

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  • Crackling/popping - constant, not just when watching videos

    ;Crackling/popping - constant, not just when watching videos' My setup is a Dell Dimension 8400 with Media Center (WinXP), Intel Pentium 4, 3.4GHz, 3070Mb RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 video card, and an Audigy 2 ZS sound card.
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    Hi @Clairceg
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  • 1212M Crackling/Popping - New Drivers

    I'm kind of cranky about this problem. Read on because I actually know exactly what the problem is (at least for most of us and only Creative/EMU can fix it).
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    I have a 1212M with the 0404 I/O card. It's a V1 that have had for five or six years. The quality of the sound is great, the features are great and the price is great. There's just one problem. From the day I got the board all those years ago I've had the crackling/popping problem that many, many other users also have.
    The problem is not my motherboard, BIOS, other hardware, Windows or other applications. Over the years this EMU board has been in many different systems, many different configurations and the evolution from WinXP, Vista and now to Win7. The crackling problem has always been exactly the same. The problem is the board itself, not the system and not the configuration and I can prove it (read on).
    Another thing that frustrates me is all the time that so many users have spent trying to troubleshoot this issue that is completely wasted since, for some of us, the problem is in the EMU hardware/drivers. That's not to say that there aren't some other crackling problems that are related to the system speed, interfering hardware or interfering software. There are actually two different problems that both have the same crackling symptom which makes all this quite confusing. I'll call them "System Related" and "EMU Hardware/Driver Related". If you're having the crackling symptom you should figure out which type of problem you have before spending hours troubleshooting, reinstalling, etc, etc, etc. Here's how:
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    - Starts with a few minor crackle/pops per second and gradually gets progressively worse over several minutes with nothing else changing in the system (ie not running new software or changing anything).
    - After a while (can be a long while) the crackling can actually go away again and you have clean audio. Then the crackling returns. Once again with no changes in system load in between.
    - You can make the crackling go away instantly and every time by simply resetting the clock on the card. There are several ways to do this. In Patchmix go to the System tab under Session Settings and switch the clock between internal/external (whatever you have it on, go to the other and back again). Another way is the change the ASIO Buffer Latency milliseconds in your host software's ASIO control panel.
    If those four things are all true for you then you have the "EMU Hardware/Driver Related" type of crackling problem. Do not waste any time with all the well-meaning but misguided troubleshooting ideas posted on this and other forums. None of it will help.
    If these four things aren't true on your system then by all means you should try all the troubleshooting steps because it's likely that you can resolve your crackling problem.
    Here is what is happening with the "EMU Hardware/Driver Related" type of crackling problem. First, let me say that I know what the root of the problem is because I used to work for a company that developed high-end professional video/audio software for Windows PCs. We encountered this exact same problem when some our users started reporting it. It wasn't solely with Creative or EMU hardware because the problem can actually happen on a variety of PC audio cards where the hardware is slightly out of spec or malfunctioning and the software driver is not capable of correcting the problem.
    Our most senior software engineers banged their heads against this problem for quite a while until they determined what was going wrong in our customer's PC audio hardware. The issue is that the clock on the card is drifting slightly which means it is going a little faster or slower than the current sample rate. That's why the problem only manifests after a while. It's also why the crackling goes away when you reset the clock. The fundamental issue is that the audio data coming from your PC is being written into a buffer. The data is written by the PC driver and read from the buffer by the card and then sent to the card's output. You can think of the buffer as a big circle of memory. There's a write pointer that writes one value of data and then increments one step and "180 degrees" opposite in the circle of memory is a read pointer that reads one value of data and then increments one step.
    These two pointers never move at exactly the same speed. They are constantly slowing down or speeding up a little bit but over time on average they end up advancing at about the same rate. The problem is that when the clock on the card is drifting, the read pointer and write pointer will eventually cross over. That's why the this kind of crackling problem manifests only after a while because, depending on the drifting, it takes a while for the pointers to cross. It's also why the crackling is subtle at first and then gets progressively worse over time. Right when the pointers are overlapping the timing is still close. As one pointer starts to "lap" the other point more and more the crackling artifact gets progressively worse. That's also why the problem usually goes away again if you wait long enough. The pointers can actually get back in phase again for a short while! That's how I know exactly what the current problem is the 1212M board because it manifests with these precise characteristics. The old problem my former companies user's had even sounded exactly the same as the crackling my EMU 1212M has.
    Once we understood the problem, in our next version we modified our software to use a larger buffer. This eliminated the problem for some of our customers whose hardware clock was only very slightly out spec. However, for other customers the problem remained, although by increasing the buffer size it made it take longer for the pointers to reach each other and the crackling to begin. This is the what I suspect EMU has done with the new Win7 beta drivers. With the new drivers my crackling takes longer to appear. In these forums we see reports from some long-time sufferers of the problem that the new driver fixed their problem and from others we hear that they are still having the problem.
    Since we still had unhappy users of our video/audio application software, we kept working on the issue and eventually came up with a fix that solved the problem for all users and all audio hardware. It was hard to implement but this is what EMU/Creative needs to have their driver engineers do to actually fix the problem (short of replacing an enormous amount of hardware).
    The problem can be solved in the driver (yes, my old company actually embedded our own low level generic driver in our application software). Since EMU/Creative is making their driver themselves they can just implement this fix there. The secret is for the driver to actually keep track of where the write and read pointers are and each time they get too close to each other it stretches or shrinks the next packet of data by averaging the audio samples in that packet to the exact size needed to put the pointers 180 degrees apart again. It then resets the pointers as it writes that new data. The data shrink or stretch prevents a single pop or click from happening when the pointers are reset to their correct positions. Frankly, this was hard to implement but it worked perfectly. We actually hired a consultant to figure this audio problem out who was a former Microsoft engineer who wrote the WDM kernal mode drivers.
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    Markran,
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  • Crackle-pop issue. Seems to be due to raid control

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  • Audigy SE newest update 2/16/07 made my crackling/pop issue wo

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  • Crackling/Popping on Audigy 2

    I have the following components on my computer:
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    Aha someone that has similar probs to myself.
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  • Snap, Crackle & Pop :( Audidgy 2 ZS Platinum Pro - Plz H

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  • Fixed my crackling, popping Soundblaster Live 5.1 Wi

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    Anyway I was wondering why the uni-driver is dated older than both drivers on our cds? Also is there a place where maybe users here can download the driver with the 5.2..296 version number on it's It worked great for me. Good luck out there.

    I've been struggling with Flash9d.ocx crashes and random BSODsfor a month or so now when playing online videos (youtube, etc) andwhen my daughter plays online flash enabled games. SometimesI've even had BSODs when the pc was just sitting there !!?Turns out the problem was due to a "bum" Soundblaster Li've! 24-bit"driver being distributed via Windows update. After a long night of disabling just about everything on the PCand then one-by-one re-enabling things, I have traced my problemto the SoundBlaster Li've 24-bit driver. I recently updated this driver via Windows Update to a version released in Jul-07(I forget the exact version number).
    When I dropped the driver back to the version which came on the OEM diskswith my PC, my problem cleared up. I. am now running version 5.2..35with a date of Jun-9-2004 without an issue. Hope this hel
    ps.
    Mike.

  • Audigy SE: Snap, crackle, pop / hardware not fo

    You think you have problems... take a look at mine... all CL relavent... I have a problem that Dell says they can't isolate, and sware they will make Creative's problem if our next course of action doesn't resolve the snap, crackles and pops in games (like Flight simulator 9 and 0, and WoW). Yes,?integrated MB?Sigmatel drivers (merge between CL and another company) and PCI SB cards have the same problems... Snap-crackle-pop and the continual "SCHHHHHH..." sounds. My system is a Dell, which of course, gives me a little support, but not much. Please read... With tech support through Dell from India and Canada, my system, w/o CL cards installed creates snap, crackles and popping sounds in any 3D engine game (like FS 9 and 0, and WoW). Dell has no idea how to solve this problem, after installing drivers for DX, doing and IDE config, reinstalling my onboard Sigmatel drivers, changing the hardware acceleration and sample rates, simply unplugging and plugging back in the input jack leading to the speakers, trying a CL's sound card, like the Audigy SE (with its own problems much like what my onboard integrated Sigmatel drivers do)...etc. Now, to all of you experiencing CL's problems, I have already tried updated drivers, moving the card from one PCI slot to another (through all PCI slots), adjusting volume levels, tried playing a DVD (couldn't hear anything well from the DVD beacuse the volume, though maxed out, wasn't loud enough), tried a SB 5. Dell Digital (same problems), and the list goes on. My system:?OS: Windows Media Center 2005Dell E50 3ghz P4 w/ ATI PCI hypermemory 256 video card(2) free PCI slots available after vidoe and TV out cardSigmatel integrated sound (not a 3D sound engine...they admitted that)2.5 gb DDR2 SDRAM, 400mhz?This isn't top of the line, but the next course of action from Dell is to wipe my system clean of WMC 2005 and install Windows XP Pro, at their cost, not mine (thank God for tech support extended warranty). At least then I will have CL driver's. After reading this post, however, and many on this forum, I find that CL's has not addressed the fundamental "problem". So, I wonder, after all is said and done, CL's hasn't really isolated the problem? What gives? It would appear the OS doesn't matter, so maybe the Chipset does? or is it the 3D sound engine? i am not a tech, and Dell tech support can't figure it out, either. So, any suggestions?

    ... and by the way, the cards won't even install with CL's software from the CD on to the system. The only way to get any of the cards to work, if at all, was to force the driver to work (going in and saying "I want THIS driver installed"). The software on the CD won't run (multiple cards...dell digital, Audigy SE, li've 5., etc) nor will the downloaded drivers EXE file run. When I forced the driver to work I got the "SCHHHH" sound, instead of the advertised "PERFECT UPGRADE FROM THE BASIC MOTHERBOARD AUDIO TO OUTSTANDING MUSIC, MOVIE AND GAME SOUND". In my case, the sound was no-more superior than a fart in space.

  • Audigy 2 ZS Snap, Crackle, Pop and a c

    I just got a new Audigy 2 ZS. My system is as follows:
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    Nvidia 5900
    .5GB DDR
    Altec Lansing 4. speakers
    I have all the latest drivers and bios for everything. I've switched PCI slots and I've tried all the knowledge base action items. The speaker config is for 4/4. speakers.
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    Adobe Audition .5
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    Thanks for the tip. I tried it and unfortunately it didn't work.
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  • 10.4.10 - Speakers crackling & popping

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  • XFi Crackle, Pop, Distort

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    Specs:
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    Message Edited by openair on 07--2008 :20 AM
    Message Edited by openair on 07--2008 0:5 PM

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  • Constant crackle with USB Sound Blaster 5.1. I'll reward you with cookies if you help

    Hey guys,
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    I am curious to learn, what kind of processor do you use?
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