Encode MP3 songs with Environmental Audio - The New Creative Digital Audio Center from MusicMatch delivers an enhanced Internet Audio experience. With its capability for unlimited CD-ripping and MP3 conversion, you can customize your own MP3 album collections with ease.
 
Join Creative VoiceChat Community using Voice / Telephony Communications - Creative MediaRing Talk, the Next Generation Internet Voice Communication Software for the Net Generation, connects you with users worldwide who have similar interests.
 
Live!Task Makes Everything Easy - Live!Task, located on the new Creative Launcher, makes it intuitive for you to perform any task on your system including Internet-related applications. Using its "I want to" selections, all you need to do is to choose the task that you want to perform and your system will be automatically configured for that task.

Enhanced Playback of Internet Music and Audio - The New Creative PlayCenter lets you add realistic audio environments, play back MP3 songs, and apply real-time effects such as "male-to-female" and "female-to-male" to change the gender of the voice.

Dolby Digital Decoding

The most controversial option of the Live 5.1! is of course its ability to decode 5.1 AC-3 (Dolby Digital streams) real-time in an amazing 48 KHz. 

What is Dolby Digital Exactly ? - Well, Dolby Digital , is a six-channel digital surround sound system, using three speakers in the front (left, right and center) and three in the back (right surround, left surround and a woofer for bass frequencies). Normally it is available in theaters and for home use. 

Dolby Digital makes use of a so called AC-3 stream. This is the technical name for Dolby's multi-channel digital sound coding technique, more commonly referred to as Dolby 5.1. A six-channel sound coding process (one channel each for front, left, center, right surround, left surround and a sub-woofer) originally created by Dolby for theaters, AC-3 was subsequently adapted for home use and is now steadily becoming the most common sound format for DVD, and it rocks.

If you have a reasonable system (read Pentium II 266 and above) with a decent videocard you can actually enjoy watching a DVD movie like you are in a cinema. Sounds from left to right from back to front, they are everywhere. The AC-3 (Dolby Digital) 5.1 experience was amazing. You can actually hear an earplane moving from the upper right towards the front left in Top Gun.

The Creative Live Platinum 5.1 passed the Dolby Digital Labs test and got approval from Dolby which means that the soundcard is capable of meeting the analog performance requirements for a Dolby Digital decoder.