Creative Sound Card with Front Panel Jacks

This is a little issue I have run into and solved that involves my Creative SB X-fi Fatal1ty with the front panel Input/output drive bay. The sound card is fantastic in many ways and if you can find one cheap it is an excellent card. It has it's flaws though and one is it uses the big stereo jacks so you will need to use adapters for most headphones. Not a big issue other than they don't make that clear when you buy the thing and they stick out from the machine a good three inches.

The biggest flaw though is the front microphone jack which is the big reason I bought the card. I wanted to use a front panel jack since it is a huge pain in the butt to use the rear jack with may set up. The problem is it didn't work. Creative will charge you $25 to tell you there is no problem with it and it is a known flaw with the programs that will only use the primary mic. So sorry, not our problem, have a nice day. Of course, any one who has a lick of sense would have given you the option of choosing which mic to make primary but Creative has long been known to not have any.

One solution is to simply go to your audio property's volume control for recording and select "2nd Line in/ 2nd Mic" as your only recording source. This works but you have to do this every time you start a program that you want to use the mic with because it will revert to the rear jack every time.

There is a better solution although its more of a cludge than a real fix but it works. Download and install this little program and it will let ou set your front mic as primary and will keep it that way.

It's free and it is working for me so far. http://www.muvaudio.com/muvixer/