Installation

Nowadays installing a device such as a video or sound card isn’t a difficult task, the Live! Platinum wasn’t the exception, it was all about opening the case, putting the card on a free PCI slot, connecting the CD audio cable and finally connecting the Live!Drive data cable that was provided by Creative.

Then I had to install the Live!Drive, I just had to connect the power connector and data cable, slide the drive in the bay and secure it using the screws that came included in the package. Finally I powered on the computer and I was gold.

After that Windows booted and recognized the Plug & Play devices, after installing the drivers and additional software that came in the CDs I was completely done.

Although the installation process is fairly easy there might be some people afraid of doing the installation by themselves that’s why the Live! Platinum includes a very complete documentation that should help with installation and also gives you a brief explanation of what you can do with each one of the programs included with the card.

Creative Software

Creative includes with all its Live! Cards a very complete suite of applications, we can mention as a remarkable utility the Creative Playcenter in which you can play files of about every audio format available. An addition of the Playcenter would be LAVA! (Live! Audio-Visual Animation), an utility I have seen Creative promoting a lot, in my opinion there is nothing cool to mention from it, totally useless from my point of view actually.

For setting and controlling the various aspects of the audio you have got the Surround Mixer, maybe one of the best things of Creative cards, from here you can control everything… set up the number of speakers, mix sounds and adjust the volume from various audio input sources and you can also create environments, using EAX effects.

Another of the utilities I wanted to try out was the Creative Digital Audio Center which should let you encode your own MP3s with no loss of quality… not much to say here, you could either record from digital or analog sources and use different compression modes such as RealAudio, Wave and of course MP3, it just worked wonderfully.

Overall the out-of-the-box experience with the Live! Platinum is excellent; I think the end-user will feel very comfortable with all the features this card has got.

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