Creative Labs SBLive

Have it for last 4 years
Easy only for play back and recording
it requires a lot of time to free the genie out of the box.

If one get familiar with Vienna Soundfont Edit program it is endless.
It is a must to try other drivers such as Kx or Aps
but even with creative labs drivers sound really great

try this settings: Soundfont 111.2mg ZX128 KR5 Bank.sf2 and EAX concerthall full reverb, patch #49,57,22.. are great.

forget about manual ,everything is on the web!

Try recording using only synthy source and all the others muted.
With cooledit pro Multi Track ,it is a full music making machine!~

Real Poly phony is about 32 but it is enough for whatever multi track recording

Great effects try cia sounds with aps driver full reverbs.
Get whatever SF2s possible.
Some good ones from Hammer:
121.5mg Fluid Release II Bank.sf2
111.2mg ZX128 KR5 Bank.sf2
084.0mg ALL In ONE GM V1.1 Bank.sf2
MagicSFver2.sf2
PC51c.sf2
63.3mg The Sound Site Album Bank V1.0 Part 1.sf2
63.3mg The Sound Site Album Bank V1.0 Part 2.sf2
63.3mg The Sound Site Album Bank V1.0 Part 3.sf2
003.2mg Roland Sound Canvas Bank.sf2
SGM-180 v1.5.sf2
FluidR3 GM.sf2
and a Really Huge 136M Piano ! (Patch #02 only)
splendid_136.sf2
Gort's_Synth.sf2
000.3mg Vintage Dreams Bank.sf2
Organ Church Gothic (782KB).sf2
ross.sf2 (Harpsichord)


MIDI is complete
a great realtime (but limited) arranger and sequencer using blaster keys' version of RHYTHMANIA which enables midi out through UART.

NO Limits! Only Based on SF2s and your skill.
The best piano and drumkits .

With proper Speakers sounds Like a live band.

(Find out the best drivers for your card, some work far better than others).
The Best Soundings are Blaster Boards 002 & 003
Sblive platinum is also good.

Great with Midi Controllers.

Great spdif in and out. A silent recording.

No Problems

I Have three of them.
The Best Soundings are Blaster Boards 002 & 003
Sblive platinum is also good.
But i installed Fan & cooler on the chips!

Moderate

Good toy to blow whatever mind you want.

I'm using Microsoft Server 2003 configured as a workstation. It's almost identical to XP only way more stable. The card was pretty easy to use. I got the thing installed and running without even touching the manual.

For the musician the hands down biggest feature of this card is it's soundfonts. The on board wave table sounds hiddeous so don't even try to use it. Go online and try to find soundfonts. It has very low recording noise (-72db). It is best when used with huge soundfonts. (50-100 megs) I recomend you have a massive amount of memory when using this card because soundfonts are loaded into memory. I have 800+ megs of ram and hope to be at a gig soon.

Onboard sounds are terrible. Soundfonts have some of the best sounds available today. If you get this card for synth purposes use Soundfonts! The rating I gave this is based on soundfonts not the on board wave table.

You can depend on this card more than most other cards out there. This however totally depends on the stability of your system as a whole. It had problems when I ran it on win XP but with Server 2003 I have not had any problems.

I've never had to get ahold of them.

A must have if you want to make music that doesn't sound sythesized and you want to get new sounds on a regular basis. Get lot's of ram and you will never want to touch a normal synth again.

Creative does a poor job of documenting how to use all the features as a result, must users will never unlock the potential. The manual helps you get the card in your PC and load the drivers, it's far from what is should be.

64-voice, hardware based digital reverb, echo and flanger. One MIDI port, 1/8" stereo line-input, 1/8" line-out, 1/8" stereo line out. MIDI synth engine is powered by the powerful E-MU101K chip. But the GM instrument sets Creative provides are horrible (I believe you get two that you can load in), they don't properly showcase the card and since you get no proper explanation on how to work with SoundFonts (or were to locate quality SoundFonts) many people will think the synth engine on this card isn't all that great, when in fact it's probably the best you can get (next to it's successor found in the Audigy 2).

The GM (Genral MIDI) instrument set you get that loads in by default is garbage, you can use it to listen to MIDI files play on web pages that's about it. Creative fails to fully explain how SoundFonts work. The technology allows you to load instruments into the synth engine (or create your own with free software from E-MU). This makes the synth engine as good as the SoundFonts that are loaded, many of them sound fantastic, on par with high end Roland/Korg synthesisers instrument, since you can selectively add remove instruments to the synth engine, there really insn't a way to review it's capabilities. I'm using a Roland MIDI controller/keyboard to control the card and Cakewalk Pro to handle sequencing and I'm blown away by the results I get with the proper SoundFonts installed. The hardware based effects are quality.

In regard to GM there are quite a few GM SoundFont packages available for the Live!, some of them are quite good, but the good ones are all memory instensive (50-100-MEG) and cost $$$. You'll notice a performance hit when you try to load large SoundFonts, but it's still nothing compared to the performance hit you'd get from using a software based synth engine.

The first two sets of drivers for Windows 2000/XP were very unstable, the latest drivers have improved stability greatly, but could be much better.

The software required to load/unload SoundFonts is unavailable as a download, if you lose your original bundled CD-ROM, expect to pay Creative $16.95 and wait three weeks to get a replacement.

To me this is unacceptable.

Overall the SoundBlaster Live! is a great value, if you're looking for a sound card that you can use with a MIDI controller as a cost effective synthesiser solution, this is cheapest way to go and still get quality sound.

Well, it works good. I've heard lots of people whine about problems with this card, and the fact is: The card works great. If something doesn't work, its probably your motherboard (If you know what that is,heh)

The features are great, even with the default drivers. Where else are you going to get a $50 card that can be a low cost guitar amp too?

Ok, this is where I have beef. All the bundled SoundFonts suck, but the card supports new ones. For all of you out there who said the card's sounds sucked, TRY A NEW SOUNDFONT!!

heh

I'd never use anything on a gig without a backup, but with this card, I'd probably have a second one as a backup.

I dealt with it, and it sucks ass.

If I lost this card, I'd buy a new one. The only thing I hate about this card is that it glitches on Windows XP by not enabled 4 speaker surround on some bootups, but hey, that's XP.

Most people will use this card with the standard drivers that comes with it, don't. Instead go to http://come.to/sblive and grab their EMu APS drivers. With those drivers your card will be nearly a professional one.

Great mixer interface, good effects and a nice Soundfont patchloading facility. The card is built around the EMU1K sound processor. This one is also used in many of EMUs products, it has a lot of features hidden away by the standard drivers. You can assign different effects to all 32 MIDI channels. The recording capabilities aren't the best, but the nois level is low.

Sounds are great if you download them from the net or make them yourself, the that comes with the card are really bad. Sounds very cheap.

Well you can never depend on a soundcard, especially not one from Creativ Labs. All connectors are cheap budget ones, but hey it's a cheap card.

Never needed any, and they won't support the EMU APS drivers!

Well, without the APS drivers this card is mostly fun for kids, but with the APS drivers it really kicks ass.

Whenever you put a board into a Windows PC, it's a roll of the dice. My SB Live! card installed with no problems and worked from the get-go. I used it with Cakewalk and Rebirth mostly. I do not use the GM presets that came with the card. My Yamaha SW60XG Card blows this one away for the presets. I use the Live card for recording digital audio mostly. Also use it for Soundfonts.

If you only have liimited $ to spend, you can't go wrong with this card. There are plenty of free soundfonts to download from the internet. There also is a Soundfont manager program that can be downloaded from the creative.com website. This enables you to use *.wav files, edit them and map them across the midikeyboard. It replaces a sampler! Some of the features of the card, though, are more consumer and gameplayer-oriented than musician-friendly. I do not use the Environmental features of the card, for example.

The signal-to-noise ratio is excellent. Although, my Yamaha SW60XG card has better sounds, the Live Card is far less noisy. With the sampling features of the card, the expressiveness of the sounds depends on the quality of the soundfont files that the card is playing.

I have had no hardware reliability problems with this card. I had some serious system crashes with my Windows 98 PC, however, that were only solved by downloading an updated driver from the Creative website.

No problem loading drivers, programs and soundfonts from the website. Never talked to anyone in person, never had to.

For the price, I would buy another Soundblaster Live card if this one died. I would even consider loading my machine with two cards, but I don't relish the idea of getting Windows to work right with it.

Ease of use, huh? Well, I installed it in my Windows 98 computer, loaded the drivers and there is was... ready for action. I used some old software called "MusicTime" (an old generic composition program) to send MIDI data to it. It plays without an special settings. This is about as easy as it gets.

I've written some pretty intense MIDI music with as many as 20 simultaneous instruments going in ways that used to cause my old sound board to hiccup. Lots of MIDI info like pitch bending, etc. This board played the files without any trouble at all. The board automatically throws in reverb and stereo presence. Subtle and nice. Fully adjustable effects.

The sound of the MIDI instruments is where the card falls down. For anybody that remembers the card, I owned a Turtle Beach Monterey back in 1994. Back then this card cost $350.00 and it was the best damn board you could buy. That old card still blows away the SoundBlaster Live. The wind instruments on the Live are stiff. The guitars are weak, some of the strings sounds are downright unusable. (Listen to it and tell me if the Contrabass instrument doesn't go "whoop" "whoop" like the guy couldn't hit the note right on.) The only way to make some of these sound right is by carefully articulating with pitch bend or control of the attack. I guess that old board spoiled me.
On the up side, the Live is very quiet (high S/N ration) and virtually distortion free. Although I haven't used it for this, I'm sure that it would do a great job for recording from analog sources.

I've never had a problem with this card and I don't expect I ever will. It seems to be very well engineered.

I've never had to speak with anyone about the board. Special praise for their website where I got the latest drivers. They've got just about every driver they ever wrote.

If something were to happen to the board I would probably buy another one like it, but not for MIDI. I've tried out a lot of sound cards in this price range and the MIDI sounds on them are far, far worse. They suck, actually. The redeeming value of this card is that it does what it does well for the price. Real composers and musicians should look at a more sophisticated cards like the Yamaha SW1000XG - the sound card that blows away many professional synths.

Everyone who's able to shitch on a pc and is a bit at home in a Windows-environment should be able to work with this cad. Forget about the wavetable-stuff, this is a cool cheapo sampler. Forget the manual, get some tutorials from the web.

Good effects, which can be applied to the line in and the soundbanks. Polyphony is 64 I think, don't know for sure. You can expand it with a Yamaho DB50XG or Roland stuff. The very coolest thing is that it uses your pc-ram as sample-ram. (who has a 128Mb sampler for a price like this?) Midi's ok, wish I knew a way to make it more controllable with realtime controllers etc.

This is an onboard sampler in the first place and a little bit of a effect-unit. The sounds are as good as you make them yourself (or the soundfont manufacturer). Effects are ok, maybe the delay/reverb should be more lenghty (I'm doing dark ambient).

100% reliable, I've never had problems.

Don't know, never dealt with creative, the website is a joke.

For it's price it's unbeatable. Of course the high-end cards are better, but I don't have the funds to get me such a card