Ubuntu Multimedia :: 4.1 Surround Sound Doesn't Work
Apr 26, 2011
I have these Creative Inspire M4500 4.1 surround sound speakers.I got them to work succesfully on my older computer by installing the ALSAmixer. and then unmuting the channels. However on my new computer even after installing ALSAmixer, i cannot seem to be able to get playback from my rear two speakers. I tried the community ubuntu documentation and ALSA's own guide(which seemed too complicated for me.)
Alsa says I'm using a HDA ATI SB audio card with realtek ALC662 rev 1. chip, I've set the default channels to 6 for 5.1 in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf but got only stereo.
I would assume I have to do something with the channel map, but I don't know where to begin. I can say it is not a hardware issue as it works fine in windows 7 where my mic in is my sub-woofer/center out and my line in is my line in is my rear speaker out. I tried going into sound preferences to see if I could get it to use line in and mic in as sub-woof out and rear out , but there was no such option. All I was allowed was analog duplex 1 output / 1 input.
I'm running slack64 13.1, I don't have KDE installed or any of the KDE libraries (so answers concerning KMix aren't going to help), I'm using xfce4 as the desktop environment. Anyway I just bought a new 4.1 surround sound speaker system from Amadeus and wanted to give it a shot. Obviously my first instinct was to plug them in and give it a whack... much to no one's surprise this didn't work. So I googled my ass off, and it seems for every person that has had a surround sound system, there's a different solution for them. I tried a couple tutorials to end at the same disappointing conclusion: the front two speakers and the subwoofer work. So here's the current situation:
The front two speakers are plugged into the speaker-out port (the green one) and the rear-two speakers are plugged into the line-out port (the light blue one). Since the subwoofer works I'm going to assume it uses the the same line that the front two speakers do. I've turned all the lines all the way up in alsamixer, and made sure it's playing on 4 channel. I reran alsaconf just to make sure and it configured snd-intel8x0 for me with no complaints. I also added a .asoundrc file that looks like this:
[Code]...
Then I ran "speaker-test -c 4 -D surround41 -t wav". Again only the front two speakers play any sound. I'm kinda new to configuring sound, as I've never before had a problem.
When I installed my 64 bit system of Ubuntu 10.04 the sound worked very well and I were very happy. The problem started however when I installed Skype which uses pulseaudio. As soon as I start skype (or any other application that uses pulse, HoN for example) the applications sound output or input does not work at all. If I have pulseaudio started in some way, applications that I suppose do not use it like spotify or flash player stops to produce sounds. And when I type "pulseaudio" in the terminal it gives me this:
When I decode an audio clip which contain 5.1 streams (the encoding doesn't matter - or does it?) I cannot find an option which allows redirection of the lower frequencies (from front, back and center channels) to the sub woofer (LFE channel). I understand that this perfectly normal and this is how 5.1 supposed to work. My problem is that my speakers are not full range, so they cannot reproduce the bass in the streams. What I want to know is if there is a way to do something like this: [URL]
Which is described as: Bass redir - Bass redirection. Route basses from all channels to subwoofer. Works only if it is subwoofer at output speakers. Highly recommended for systems with separate subwoofer. Basses are routed before mixing so basses are shown at LFE input level (although 'real' LFE may be absent).
I'm aware of the enable-lfe-remixing = yes option. It works fine for stereo, but not for 5.1
I use ubuntu 9.10 and my pulseaudio version is 0.9.19. The player I use most is SMPlayer (version 0.6.8 (SVN r3213)) and AC3-liba52 for AC3 decoding. My system is up to date.
Currently using an Asrock ION 330 with an SPDIF output and running 10.04It works as stereo but can't get the system to run as surround sound and everything shows as 2 channels only.The hardware itself supports it fine as it works under windows 7 without issues so it has to be a config issue somewhere.I have tried everything I can find via google including upgrading the alsa drivers but so far there has been no change.
I've been trying to get my surround sound(5.1) to work for the past couple of of days, followed a number of guides, but nothing seems to get it working at all. I'm connecting the speakers using 3 analogue audio cables, I have tested and they work fine under Windows. When I go into the Sound options in Ubuntu I don't see a 5.1 profile listed under the Hardware tab, only stereo(and that works fine).
The sound controller is a Realtek ALC892 built-in to my mobo(Gigabyte P55A-UD3).
Here is some info I've seen requested in other threads, I'm running 10.10 RC, but I can assure you it doesn't work under earlier versions.
Code: Linux Yurippe 2.6.35-22-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Sun Sep 19 20:32:27 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux Code: **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC892 Analog [ALC892 Analog]
I just got a 5.1 Surround sound system and set it up. I found that it was only working as stereo, though (That is, only the two frontal speakers were producing any sound). I made sure everything was not muted in alsamixer and checked that the hardware was set to 5.1 in the Sound Preferences Hardware tab.
I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 64bit and my sound card is an onboard Intel DG41TY, Realtek ALC888VC codec.
I recently purchased a Creative Fatal1ty headset with a USB connection, and was wondering if it's possible to use its 5.1 surround sound capabilities under Ubuntu.
I have a Acer Aspire Revo R3600 running Ubuntu 10.10. Its a clean install, all I have done is update the NVidia drivers and ASLA. The PC connects to my AV Receiver via HDMI and I have stereo sound but no surround sound. If I go to System > Preferences > Sound and look under the hardware tab I only have "Internal Audio Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output" and no mention of surround sound or 5.1 etc. I assume this is part of the problem.
Here is the update to the old thread that somehow disappeared "HOWTO: A52 Encoded 5.1 Surround Sound Awesomeness with PulseAudio and ALSA on Hardy" thread (archived here). See also this bug report.There are two steps here: add the a52 plugin, and tell pulseaudio to use it.
Step 1: Go to a terminal and do the following:
Code: sudo bash echo "pcm.a52 {[code]....
Pulse should come back on its own unless you disabled autospawn.Now pulse should be aware of your digital surround output. Go to System -> Preferences -> Sound. Click on the "Hardware" tab and change the profile to one of the 'Digital Surround 5.1' profiles. Play some sound (I like to test with www.pandora.com) and enjoy!If it doesn't show up, it probably means that alsa didn't create it correctly. To test if alsa sees the a52 device, type:
Code: aplay -D a52:0
If it errors out (audio open error: No such file or directory) then that means it did not like your asound.conf settings. You might learn something by looking at the output of 'sudo alsa reload' or just 'aplay'.[code].....
I got a 5.1 desktop sound sys for my recently built gaming rig. It sounds great. On Windows, that is. In ubuntu when I'm playing music, primarily when the subwoofer plays the bass, the speakers sound like they're farting and ripping phone books in half. Also, they get very statticy and sort of quiet. In sound preferences, analog stereo duplex is selected, if that's of any value. How can I get good sound playback in ubuntu?
Well i will write this down one more time i hope you don't delete it again To enable surround sound with ALC888 on Intel DG31PR for all versions of ubuntu inluding Lucid.(this works on other distros with alsa as well) gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf Find this line (if there is no such line (or the file is empty) it doesn't matter just add the next line and save it)(note that on older Ubuntu versions the file is named "alsa-base" as far as i remember): # Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0
Add this line after the #Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index0: options snd_hda_intel model=3stack-6ch-dig Then use this command to edit pukeaudio: gksu gedit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
Find this line: ; default-sample-channels = 2 Change it to (make sure to remove the ; in front of it): default-sample-channels = 6
On my initial setup I follow the Comprehensive sound guide that is posted on the ubuntu forums because I wanted to get the spdif work Optical out with surround. After a while I was able some how to get it to work and but my headphones would no longer output sound so in an effort to get sound back to the headphones I maanged to ruin the the settings for the spdif.My question is how can I get spdif back and switch between headphones and spdif.I there no way to figure it out how do I purge every file that has to do with sound and recompile. ( THe comprehensive sound guide showed how to purge the alsa utils but that didnt work if someone know why please let me know and if you could explain.)
I found out there is no way to install headset's own drivers. At least I am looking for a way to switch its 5.1 property on. Is there any way for it on ubuntu 10.04 with pulse or whatever works?
My 785G motherboard comes with an integrated sound card. In the manual I see there is an option to install Dolby Software to make 2-channel stereo sources play to 4, 5.1, and 7.1. Is there any equivalent Dolby or other software for OpenSuse 11.2?
ive just installed dosbox, my favorite dos emulator. in windows, i usually used to play doom and both sound and video worked flawlessly. when i tried running doom in dosbox in ubuntu, the game ran perfectly, but the problem is with the sound. the soundblaster sound effects stutter and are not even working at times. the soundblaster based music doesnt even work! i either blame pulse-audio or the defaut config settings.
i just reported a bug to launchpad (#511562. i'm not sure if this bug is in flashplugin-installer or pulseaudio.when i use firefox or chrome for watching a flash video from videos for example, all works good. i then transfer the sound to a remote sink using sound preferences > output > internal audio analog stereo on myuser@otherhost. after this is done, the flash video halts. this is also true if i restart firefox and start a new video, already having transferred the sound. sometimes you can see the video taking huge skips forward. for example, on a 3 minute music video, i see 3-4 different frames from different places in the video. the sound is ok though! 100% reproducible and if i transfer the sound back to local speakers the video resumes and plays perfectly.
I have made a pretty sizable mistake. I was trying to figure out why my game was having sound issues when I was told to update my sound drivers. After a bit of searching, I came across this website. I downloaded and ran the script in the first link. Minor problem: I was using PulseAudio, not ALSA. Needless to say, the script didn't work. After the machine rebooted, I had no sound at all. I was planning on switching to ALSA anyway, so I found this thread and ran the following commands:
I have been experiencing this peculiar issue with Ubuntu 9.10. Whenever the system boots, the audio doesn't work but when I do a 'sudo alsa force-reload', the volume icon gets muted and on unmuting it the audio works. This is the information regarding the audio device I get on doing lspci
I'm trying to use a webtv subscribtion on ubuntu kermic, however it seems that that vlc dosnt support wmap yet, so i'm not getting any sounds on it. Does anyone have a clue on how to get this fixed, or if its even possible to get it fixed? I've tried searching guides for it without anyluck. And when i'm trying to set it to use gmplayer or totem it dosn't work either, mplayer and totem dosnt get either picture or sound.
I borked my perfectly good 11.2 install, while replacing a failing hard drive. I reinstalled, and now my sound doesn't work - or not quite. I get the left front channel, nothing else. Battle Duel crashes due to sound errors - or I probably wouldn't care.
Since I was change my mainboard and sound chip of course kmix doesn't work, I can change the volume but it doesn't effect on output volume it look like kmix have 3 level, Mute, Low and high.
I was just using the mic and watched it stop working suddenly. I was in the middle of a skype test call when the graphical mixer level died down to zero in the middle of the call. When the test call was played back, the first part sounded fine then the sound got lower until it became inaudible. Since then I can't get any sound from my mic in skype.
Also, the audio input level graphically shown in Sound Preferences shows no fluctuations in sound as it used to before. The input device is enabled. I tried using Sound Recorder to record some sound clips and that worked fine. So the mic is working but Sound Preferences and Skype seem to have the mic level really low. I'm not sure what else to think considering it was working perfectly a few minutes ago. I've tried restarting, but that didn't fix it either.
I have on-board sound on a EVGA nForce 750i FTW edition motherboard, not sure if you need the board type, but I'm not getting any sound out of my headset which is a Razer Barracuda 5.1 surround sound. link me to a very basic tutorial video/text document for Ubuntu Linux.