Troy’s Random Ramblings

Yippee!! After a little bit of fiddling around I have finally managed to get 5.1 surround sound working in Linux.

I’ve got a SoundBlaster Live! soundcard and I’m using the emu10k1 ALSA drivers in kernel 2.6.

To get all speakers working I suggest that you use alsamixer from the alsa-utils package to adjust your volumes.

Once you have everything how you like it, use alsactl to save your volumes to a file, a bit of rc-script hacking and you can have your volumes restored on boot and saved on shutdown.

To get 5.1 for your movies requires a player that can support it, MPlayer is one and getting it working is dead simple. Pass -channels 6 on the command line to mplayer and you’ll have lovely 5.1 surround sound.

BTW, all these applications can be installed easily in Gentoo, simply do:

emerge alsa-utils mplayer

and you should be good to go. Gentoo also has a nice rc-script to handle the volume:

rc-update add alsasound boot

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2004 at 9:27 am and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.