How to Fix the missing ‘THX TrueStudio Pro’ from SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium HD

You have purchased X-Fi Titanium HD. Installed the card in your PCI-E slot. Connected your headphone / speaker to the card. Booted up the computer. Installed the supplied X-Fi Titanium HD’s driver and ….. open up the slick Creative Audio Console….. but ….the THX icon at your Audio Console is not there?

Oh Crap! You are screwed because all the glories of THX TrueStudio Pro (which is also one of the signature to this awesome card) is missing.

If you do not install Audio Console, your Audio Control Panel should be like the picture below.

Oh wait! Before you go berserk and pulling your hair frustratedly, please note that THX TrueStudio Pro is only available in ENTERTAINMENT MODE! So, don’t expect to have this thing if you use Game or Audio creation mode…

So, why the hell is this thing happen? Here are the possibilities:

1. Your old dedicated audio card is previous generation X-Fi (happen to me : X-Fi Platinum). You failed to uninstall the old drivers completely.
2. You did not disable your integrated audio chip.
3. You did disable the integrated audio chip but failed to uninstall the driver completely.

Quick and dirty solution:

1. Install the card and the driver in clean state OS. In other word, format your computer and re-install everything. Super big chances it will work.

Messy solution:

1. Remove the cards
2. Install the card in different PCI-E Slot.
   • X-Fi Titanium HD uses PCI-E x1 header. It can be installed in either the short PCI-E slot (x1 version) or the long one (x4,x8,x16 version)
3. Uninstall all X-Fi’s drivers and software.
4. Disable integrated audio chipset and remove all the related drivers.
5. Clean your registry (backup first). It is up to you to use what product to fix and clean your registry’s garbage.
6. Reboot
7. Install the drivers and applications from the supplied CD.
8. Update them.
9. Reboot and Pray.

Honestly, I used the ‘Quick and dirty solution’ since it was suggested by the Creative’s staff. However, not everyone can afford to reformat their computer hence some lucky users capable to fix this problem by using the ‘Messy Solution’.

Good luck.

Spice up Foobar 2000

Foobar 2000 is a very small and minimalistic audio player. But, its modularity make me fall in love with it.These are the components that always will be installed whenever I reinstall foobar.

Noise Sharperning:

The Noise Sharpening DSP boosts high frequencies. The effect depends on the signal’s sample rate. Very handy for darky headphone owner such as AiAiAi TMA-1 therefore, other genre such as Pop, classic etc will not sound muddy. This can is great for RnB, Trance, Electronic and Dance music though (without Noise Sharpening). In short, this component will make your sound brighter.

URL: http://foosion.foobar2000.org/components/?id=delta

 

Windows 7 Shell Integration:

Windows 7 shell integration addon (foo_w7shell) is a plugin to utilize brand new interface features like custom preview thumbnails, flyout toolbars and others.

You’d just unpack the plugin to your components directory. It works “out of the box” and adds nice and user-friendly interface features to your favorite player.

If you want, you can disable progress indicator, hide “stop” button from toolbar or perform some other tweaks via settings page. But you wouldn’t find any system settings – it’s as simple as your iPod.

Features:

• Album art in thumbnail
• Play/pause/stop/next track/previous track buttons in thumbnail
• Progress indicator
• Customizable jump lists
• Overlay icon to display play/pause state

URL: http://wintense.com/plugins/foo_w7shell

 

ASIO :

ASIO 2.0 support. Great for those who own high end soundcard and prefer to use ASIO instead of default audio driver. Personally, I use ASIO component with my Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum in Audio Creation Mode + Beat Match + 96KHz sampling.

URL: http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_out_asio

 

Personal Backup? http://www.mediafire.com/?q9k6k3tyy6ty2a5

 

How to select and download certain files or folders from a bittorent file and skip the rest.

Ensure your uTorrent’s preference is set to show a windows that displays the files inside the torrent in advanced mode.

1. At the menu bar, click Options -> Preferences (or press Ctrl + P).
2. At the left pane, click on the UI Settings.
3. Under When Adding Torrents’ category, ensure Show a window that displays the file inside the torrent in advanced mode is selected.
4. Click OK button.

 

Download a torrent file and add it into your bittorent client (UTorrent).

1. 1.       Download a torrent file and save it on your desktop (or anywhere which is convenience to you). (I am gonna download a One Piece torrent file and save it on my desktop.)
2. Double click the torrent file (as for my case, it is One Piece[torrent.jiwang.cc]). This will open uTorrent’s Add New Torrent window.

Select file that you want to download and skip the rest. In this case I want to download everything but episodes 1 until 404. In other word, I only want to download episode 405 onward plus its OVA, Film etc.

1. Under the Torrent Contents’ field, uncheck file or folders that you want to skip (don’t want to download).
2. Click OK button.

Done.

 

 

 

How to schedule uTorrent to run everytime your computer boot-up (regardless user account etc)

My home computer has several user accounts. My wife, my kids and administrator. Since this home computer is also serves as torrent server, I want it to run utorrent regardless who login into their account (in fact, I want it to run even if nobody login into their account as well). I may solve this problem using ‘run utorrent as service’ but it is unnecessary complication.

Task scheduler could tackle this problem perfectly. This is how I did:

Initialize the scheduler:

1. At start menu, type ‘Task Scheduler‘ and run it.
2. Create a task by clicking ‘Create Task‘ (not the basic one). You can find this ‘Create Task’ link at the Actions pane (right pane).

General Tab:

1. Assign it a name. As for my case, I named it as ‘uTorrentService‘.
2. Click on ‘Run whether user is logged on or not’ radio button‘.
3. Select ‘Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2‘. If you try this tutorial at Windows Vista, use Windows Vista instead.

Triggers Tab:

1. Create new trigger by clicking New… button.
2. Select begin the task ‘At startup‘.

Action:

1. Create a new action by clicking New… button.
2. Select ‘Start a program‘ as Action type.
3. Browse uTorrent executable file. Normally found at C:\Program Files\uTorrent\uTorrent.exe. If your Windows is 64 bit edition, find uTorrent at Program Files (x86) instead of normal Program Files.

Settings:

1. Uncheck ‘Stop the task if it runs longer than: 3 days‘.
2. Click OK button.
3. Enter administrator password.

Run the schedule:

1. At the left pane, click at ‘Task Schedule Library‘.
2. Click at your newly created schedule. As for my case, it is ‘uTorrentService‘.
3. Click ‘Run‘ at Actions pane (right pane).
4. Restart your computer.
5. Check either the schedule is executed whenever the computer is boot-up regardless users’ credential or even if no one is log into. Hint: I check it using uTorrent web GUI which I access using different computer.

How to run VirtualBox VM as a Windows’ service.

VMware can do this without any much problem. However, I kinda favor to VirtualBox due to its Linux (as guest OS) driver superiority. I have been reading several quite technical tutorials on how to achieve this. Without any doubt, those authors are amazing. Unfortunately, my hand is tight and I really need a simple and quick solution for this. Lucky for me, somebody has created a software for this purpose; VBoxVmService. A free ware and open source. Sweet.

While I have been tinkering with VirtualBox on Windows hosts, one thing I really wanted to do is to run VMs truely in the background. So that there are no console windows or anything left behind while the VM is running. VirtualBox has a utility called VBoxHeadless which you think would do the trick, but unfortunately it leaves a console window running, as far as I can tell, just to spew out a little information. This is even when you’ve selected to access the screen via VRDP.

Well, I just found this handy little tool called VBoxVmService. With this package, you can easily create up to 127 VMs and run them as a service is any flavor of Windows (I tried it with Windows 7 x64). The set up instructions are pretty straight forward, essentially unpack the software somewhere, edit the configuration file to add your VM(s), register VBoxVmService as a Windows service, and start the service.

The only odd thing for me was that initially the start up process complained that it could not find my VMs by name. After digging around a few posts on the VirtualBox forums, I found a workaround that fixed it for me. I had to add VBOX_USER_HOME as a System environment variable, and reboot. After which everything has been running great.

The VMs start up at boot, and I can access them with Windows Remote Desktop Connection client.

Credit: Mock @ Oracle