RejZoR's little secrets

Yesterday i got my new soundcard, the famous ASUS Xonar Essence STX. However first thing that cought my eye was butt ugly tray icon. Blue and black mother of all uglyness. Yuck. So i've made my own in 10 seconds with Paint.NET, IcoFX and ResHacker. It's nothing fancy but still light years better than original one. Anyone who wants to swap it for my new one, here is how you can do it.

First and most important is to exit the Xonar tray icon. Right click it and select "Exit"!
Now download ResHacker, unpack it somewhere and run ResHacker.exe (Run as Administrator if using Vista/Win7), click "File" in toolbar menu and then "Open..."
Navigate to:
C:\Program Files\ASUS Xonar Essence STX Audio\Customapp

...select AsusAudioCenter.exe and click "Open".

Download this icon file and save it somewhere.

Now go to ResHacker again and select "Action" and then "Replace Icon..."
Select "Open file with new icon..." and select the stx.ico (the one you've downloaded few seconds ago).
Now click "Replace" button below.

Final step is to save the changes, so click "File" menu button again and then "Save".
Reshacker will modify the file and automatically create a backup file in the same folder where original is located. Thats why it's very important to run ResHacker with "Run as Administrator", otherwise it will probably fail to patch the file and make a backup.

And now the results (first icon in traybar is from Xonar Essence)...

Old icon:


New icon:


Looks much better doesn't it? Enjoy!

I've made this tool to solve some of OpenAL issues. OpenAL is an open audio subsystem that has replaced old DirectSound (starting with Windows Vista). Most of new games use it to utilize hardware accelerated sound and special effects like EAX Advanced HD.
But when things go wrong, it's usually because of either very old OpenAL libraries, corrupted OpenAL files or something similar. This tool deletes old files, automatically downloads latest OpenAL installer and executes it. It should be easy enough for anyone to at least try to solve sound related problems without extensive help from tech support or the geeks around

Oh and don't forget to update your audio drivers if you haven't already!

Situations where this tool might help:
- no sound in games
- sound is skipping or has bad delay
- cannot enable Hardware Acceleration in games
- cannot enable EAX audio effects
- when games crash with error "OpenAL32.dll cannot be found" or something similar

OpenAL Generic Fixer download:
OpenAL_Generic_Fixer.zip