Recently a post in on online forum by a member of Creative Labs' staff seemed to indicate that the Sound Blaster Live for Mac OS was about to ship. Unfortunately, that post was overly optimistic, and CL has since retreated from that position. While they will no longer mention a release date (and one of our major sources of information has "gone silent") the company wishes to emphasize their commitment to the Mac platform and to delivering the best product they can; at least that was the response we got from Hector Marinez, public relations manager.

As was the case at Macworld Expo San Francisco, it seems that compatibility with third-party applications is still the stumbling block between Mac users and this long-awaited card. There are dozens of pro audio applications and tools for the Mac OS, far more than most people imagine, and many have unconventional ways of using Apple's various sound managers and audio tools. Obviously there are a few that continue to give CL trouble, or this card would be shipping to those who preordered already. Here is part of Hector's reply:

When we first embarked on entering the Macintosh
market, we announced that we would be shipping a Sound Blaster Live!
product by the end of 2000. Fortunately, our dedicated development team
got our drivers to work with all of our bundled software -- which includes
music playback, music creation and gaming software -- but unfortunately, we
have decided to delay the product slightly because we have found that
various and popular 3rd party software needed some tweaking because of the
customer’s experience. These problems can be fixed, but a lot of the
Macintosh 3rd-party software treats sound manager and OMS drivers
differently, which means that the driver needs more work and more robustness
in order to provide the best customer experience.

Creative Labs

Sound Blaster Live! Preview

Creative (add to watch list)

Sound Blaster Live! (add to watch list)

Search for other Mac games news stories or browse our Mac Games News Archive.