Don't get Creative

That isn't what it means on the surface. Several years ago, I bought a Creative X-Fi Fatality Platinum sound card, with the breakout box, so I can plug into the front of my computer, and have great sound as well. For a few months it worked fine, then my motherboard failed. That had nothing to do with the card, but I took it as an opportunity to upgrade to a higher spec system, 64-bit, and Windows 7. I checked the Creative website, and they had a Windows 7 driver. No problem, right?

Wrong.

I installed everything, no problem. Sound card worked fine.

Then I restarted my computer. Snap. Crackle. Pop. Static. I checked the Creative website again to see if I could sort this out. They recommended updating the driver. Nope. Didn't work. I contacted customer service. They told me to try several things that I had already tried. Eventually, I Googled the problem and found something that led me to the Microsoft Knowledge Base. 

It seems that that 64-bit computers allow the addressing of more than 4GB of memory. Yay! Unfortunately, Creative X-Fi sound cards don't. It isn't a physical problem, as I discovered when I first installed the card. It worked properly until restart, then something kicks it. I informed Creative of the issue, but they weren't interested. They don't even have it mentioned in their support forum. Basically, they are looking the other way.

To get around it, you have to limit your MAXMEM in your bootloader to under 4000 MB ... not 4GB which is 4096 MB. For a while I was working at 3996, but at some point I changed it to 3800. I can't remember why.

On comes Sibelius 7. For months, I've been trying to figure out why the really nice Sibelius 7 sounds don't work ... well ... one does. The piano sounds fantastic, but in my Piano Concerto, that is all I get. I have to resort to Sibelius 6 sounds.

You can see where this is going.

Sibelius 7 sounds require 4+ GB of memory, and that is 4 GB just to play the "lite" sound set. You really want 8 GB for the whole set. 3800 MB seems to be just enough to load the first sound.

I figured that maybe I'd have a look back at the Creative website. Windows 8 is now out and you would expect them to update the driver for their flagship sound card. They did, however they only added Windows 8 support. They did not fix the problem, and they still have nothing about it on their site.

I did some more digging and found this discussion from 2011: http://forums.creative.com/archive/index.php?t-577245.html, which was eye-opening in a way, but only confirmed what I already knew. Creative just didn't care.

Now I'm in a quandary  Do I deep-six my $200 sound card and add some memory to my system, or stick with the inferior Sibelius 6 sounds? What would I replace it with?