Completely remove sound drivers

[Spidey]

After going through hell getting that issue solved with my media box, I would really like to get back to my original drivers… (they have more options that I would like to have, such as a higher digital output sample rate and a nice skinned interface that contains an equalizer) the drivers that are installed are working, so I don’t want any nuclear options such as reinstalling my OS.

I have already tried…

Rolling back the driver…but no luck

Removing all of the creative Labs items from Programs and Features and deleted the driver from device manager and deleting the Creative folder from program files.

But when I try to install the older drivers, right after the decompressing routine, I get a message that newer drivers are detected…you have to exit from there, then it continues, but installs the newer drivers instead of the ones that I want.

So basically what I need is maybe some tool that will safely clean up after the uninstall routine, or some such, or some advice regarding what I did wrong, and be honest if you think I should just live with it.

Any tools must be safe!

[AceCombat]

Driver Sweeper will rid you of those nasty drivers! Guaranteed Safe and quick

[Spidey]

Great...I'll check it out.

[Spidey]

Well, I went ahead and purchased the pro version of Driver Fusion, and deleted the remaining 57 files left over after uninstalling the Creative apps.

And It didn’t work…when I tried to reinstall the older drivers I got the same message as I got the first time (ERROR: Newer drivers detected on system) and them the install stopped…again

Only thing was…this time I had no drivers at all when I was finished…so I just used windows to “fix Sound Problem” and it reinstalled the drivers I’ve been trying to get rid of.

Guess I’ll try contacting Creative…but I can already guess what that will be like…

[AceCombat]

what card is this? do you still have the CD that came with it?

[Spidey]

It’s an X-Fi Extreme Music card and the original disk is useless because it came with the original OS that was installed on this machine…XP (any uninstallers on that disk would be useless)

I upgraded to Win 7 and installed the web drivers that windows guided me to during installation…which worked great…until I upgraded them in a failed attempt to solve a problem that turned out to be something else.

The new drivers work…but they are missing some of the features I really want…like Bass and Treble…doh! And the EQ is missing as well as the higher bitrates. I wish someone could explain why Creative excluded these from the driver set…because it just doesn’t make any sense. They could at least warn people that the newer drivers don’t include those features.

[Krom]

Is the "roll back driver" functionality available in device management? Or have you attempted system restore back to the point where you updated the drivers?

[Spidey]

No good on any of those.

[Krom]

If system restore doesn't fix it, then you are pretty much stuck with it, because system restore can and often does REALLY take a system back. Rolling back a restore point can go as far as reinstalling old programs you removed (even non-windows components), and or restoring your documents to a previous state. In windows 7 it is just barely short of being a full image of the system partition, so if it can't do it, then it probably can't be done using automated tools unless you have an actual system image from before the change.

The only way you are going to get that back at this point is by manually unregistering/removing the relevant files and removing the relevant registry entries.

As for the Bass and Treble settings, creatives drivers have always sucked and the software adjustments of those probably just lead to excessive clipping anyway, if you are going to boost them it is probably better to do it with an actual amplifier on the other end. I'm not sure what you are talking about with the higher bitrates, Windows 7 supports up to 24 bit audio with a 192 KHz sample rate out of the box with pretty much any high definition audio driver. Just right click the systray volume control icon, pull up playback devices, then hit properties on the primary playback device and in the supported formats tab you can set the sample rate, and in the advanced tab you can set the default format (note that setting it to anything other than 16 bit / 44.1 KHz can cause clicking/popping or outright missing audio in a lot of older games and pretty much any other program that plays sound since the vast majority of them assume the system is 16 bit / 44.1 KHz). But for any of that to actually be relevant you have to have a digital amplifier that can confirm you are operating at those settings and not just kicking back to 16 bit / 44.1 KHz.

[Spidey]

The 192 sample rate is what I want to go back to, the new drivers only offer 48 and 96…they used to offer more of them…The tone is not really a concern…or the EQ because every device I use has it’s own EQ. So those things I can live without. But I do prefer using the software tone control, because I set my amp to “pure direct” to play back music. (boosting bass with “effects” causes distortion, I prefer to keep all “effects” at a minimum) I only use a minimum of boost anyway, so clipping is never a problem.

System restore is not an option, because I neglected to make a point when I did the driver install, and I would be guessing about using one of the others. (was ready to toss the machine out the window, when I was trying to solve the problem)

Roll back is grayed out.

I need to find the file that the installer is looking at to determine the current driver version, because it sure as hell is not looking at the actual drivers, because I wiped those off using Driver Fusion. (reggie entries and all else, that the data base says must be deleted) Apparently Driver Fusion doesn’t know what file the web installers look for to determine current file version. (or always assumes you want to go forward)

[Krom]

What sort of amp are you using? I'm curious because my Yamaha amp maxes out at 24 bit / 96 KHz and cannot accept 192 KHz in either 16 or 24 bit depths (although I default to 16 bit / 44.1 KHz just for compatibility with older games anyway).

One place windows often reads driver information from is if there is a relevant inf file is in \Windows\inf, or it might keep a copy of the driver in \Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository, and/or other places including temp folders ( %temp% ), your application data folders ( %appdata% ), specific folders on the C: drive like Nvidia display driver packs place a copy of themselves in C:\NVIDIA\ or even as a part of a tool suite in \Program Files\. Perhaps searching the entire drive for creative's hardware vendor ID (VEN_1102) might turn up something useful. But the ordinary windows 7 search client isn't going to be useful at all here so you should instead search it with Agent Ransack or some other high powered file/disk searching tool. It is probably a good idea to limit the first few searches to just *.inf files, which will save many gigabytes of disk thrashing. You can also narrow it down a bit by including the relevant device ID, meaning search for files that contain both the vendor ID and the device ID, which you can obtain from device management: Pull up properties for the sound card, and in the details tab there will be a drop down menu with "Hardware Ids" usually as the second option, right click one of the lines and you can copy the ID. (It doesn't actually have to have the driver installed, even an unknown device will show this information.)

A hardware ID looks like this:
HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10DE&DEV_0040&SUBSYS_14622821&REV_1001 (for reference: this is the ID for a Nvidia high definition audio device).
The relevant part is VEN_#### which is the vendor ID, the DEV_#### is the device ID, and SUBSYS and REV are further drilling down the details to a specific device. This is basically the guts of how plug and play works, devices tell windows this information when they are plugged in to the computer, and windows looks around in its files and driver lists for a matching driver or asks the user for a driver disk if it doesn't have one.

I also highly recommend creating a full system restore point and or backup before you delete, overwrite or modify any files in these locations. To speed things up, I also recommend using disk cleanup or ccleaner to flush your temporary folders ahead of time.

[Spidey]

Yea, I think I’m going to cut my losses at this point and move on….

I don’t play any games on this machine…I’m just looking for maximum sound quality on WMP…AIMP…and DVD’s.

JFTR my AMP is a Denon AVR-988 and using DTS-HD it will only accept 24/96 but I’m thinking it could utilize 192 with its AL24 Processing Plus. (DVD sample rate)

I play all of my DVD’s on my PC…so I was concerned that the system was not putting out 192.

Anyway…I think I’m being way too anal at this point…the music sounds ok…

[Krom]

Most DVD(-video) is sampled at 48 KHz anyway, so turning the system sample rate up higher would be a waste of time. Any decent audio card should just be set to pass the DTS or AC3(Dolby Digital) straight through the SPDIF so you get the best possible audio quality from the disk. To get the best quality from a bluray you need a HDMI audio pass through, and that is still a mostly broken mess because of DRM.

[Spidey]

Thanks for clearing that up.

If I ever buy a Blu-Ray player (not likely) it will be connected directly to the AMP via HDMI. (stand alone)

I did consider installing a Blu-Ray drive in this machine, at one time...but that was just a passing fancy.

Thanks

[BUBBALOU]

If your sound card is based on any of the audigy series then your best option would be the ones produced by daniel_k

These are usually found at the creative site as unsupported, for full package installs that give all the features available that the "official" drivers disable with newer updates

Unless its a generic OEM from a PC MFG with a creative label