Yeah mother bitches! My 5.1 surround sound is finally pumping!
This issue has been plaguing me ever since I started using Ubuntu. My stupid Creative Labs card just wouldn’t play nice. I finally found the missing element to get 5.1 sound working with my Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24bit.
The guys at ALSA absolutely rule for being able to support this card, given no information on how it works.
Right, so how does it work.
ALSA (1.0.10) supports my card through the ca0106 module. My sound has always worked but I’ve never been able to get it working with 5.1. The key was the ~/.asoundrc.
I’d been playing with Beep Media Player (which is now the best media player ever!), and noticed that the ALSA plugin can be configured. I was able to play with the device that BMP uses and realised that my sound was indeed working from all channels except not at once. CA0106(hw0:0) was the front channel, CA0106(hw0:1) the rear, CA0106(hw0:2) the centre/sub-woofer.
Reading through the ALSA wiki I found a dude’s .asoundrc, that did some routing of the devices and channels, and I did get 5.1 surround sound going, but with extreme stuttering. I will be back to that page very soon, to work out how to low-pass the sound to my sub-woofer.
In the end the Gentoo Wiki provided the gold. The Gentoo Wiki is a friggin great source of Linux info. Everything is really well documented, and those guys know how to configure their shit. Gentoo 2006 is getting a shot on my PC soon.
Anyway here’s the link and the ~/.asoundrc file, its not even for my chipset, but if it works I’m using it.
#########################################################
#This is the standard setting (see: “!default”)
#This profile, the default loaded, upmixes stereo sound to 5.1.pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “surround51″
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}
########################################################
#This is the normal spdif output profile (optical, toslink).pcm.!spdif {
type plug
slave.pcm “hw:0,1″
}#######################################################
#This is what one could call the “factory default setting”, in other words, it only plays the actual channels.
#so if you fx want to watch a 5.1 movie, on the analog output, this is the option you want.pcm.analog {
type plug
slave analog_slave;
}pcm_slave.analog_slave {
pcm surround51;
format S32_LE;
}
Credit to 01mf02, Alrua, and ALSA-project.org Guide and individual customizations of “.asoundrc”
Unbelievable my sound works!!!!
In a few words, I love you.
I googled a lot and finally I find your comment, that obviusly works for me. I also have a ca0106 card, and finally I hear all channels.
A lot of thanks.
Most welcome Manuel. I’m glad it helped you!
It was such a pain to work this out, because I could not find anyone else (forums, www) with the same card who had resolved it.
Next thing I want to do is try to filter the channels, so the sub only plays the lower frequencies.
holy shit! you have done it! if you figure out how to get the low freq’s to the sub … email me … it finally works with the front channel duplicated to the rear channel … and now i can finally listen to music in the shower … sweet …
-chaosape
Great to hear it worked for you too!!
I swear it was the coolest thing, when I had sound coming from all speakers. I think I went pretty nuts, it had been driving me crazy for so long.
When I have time, I will get onto the filtering… I’ll post how I go here, and if successful let you know.
If you get bored waiting, you can always check things out here
http://alsa.opensrc.org/SurroundSound