# surround sound on ubuntu gutsy (5.1)



## blue4paper (Aug 11, 2007)

Yeah are there any sound configuration programs? When i was watching a dvd i tried going to the settings for the dvd player, 5.1, but that doesn't seem to work. 

On windows i'm using 3D Audio Configurations, works great too. Anything just as great for linux? Or is it like a manual configuration? 

or does it require sound drivers? probably does


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## blue4paper (Aug 11, 2007)

Heres a picture of my sound options. I think its just "C rear panel". Not sure so i just took a picture of it all 





Edit : Merry Christmas lol


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## briealeida (Jun 3, 2007)

Right-click the volume icon in your taskbar. (Looks like a speaker, kinda.)
Select 'Preferences'.
There should be an option for 'Surround'.

I know it might sound obvious but make sure you have 5.1 surround-compatible speakers.

I have a 7.1 surround audio card but it's useless until I upgrade my speakers. lol.


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## blue4paper (Aug 11, 2007)

its obvious because it doesn't work lol. I've selected it all there. I recently tried to compile alsa seeing as everyone said it worked. After compiling alsa my sound card isn't even recognized. On top of my resolution issues lol >.>.'' Any other ideas though? on how to at least get my sound working again.


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## blue4paper (Aug 11, 2007)

Well, after reading through various forums and etc. I've read that alot of people have compiled alsa. So i decided to try it. Following up a very recent and well done tutorial. After the compiling my sound is now no longer even recognized.

Any ideas?

Here are some pictures of what it says when i try to open alsamixer and try a speaker test:


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## blue4paper (Aug 11, 2007)

I also found a new compiling alsa guide "https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto" and everything in there is exactly what i did except for one thing. Where it says "sudo mkdir -p /usr/src/alsa" i did "sudo mkdir -p /usr/alsa/" could this be causing my audio issues?

Edit: Also when i type in the command "cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec" i get "no such file or directory"

I did post on ubuntuforums also just waiting for reply. Thought i'd give it a go here to.


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## blue4paper (Aug 11, 2007)

Got it to work off another guide. http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3768914&postcount=60

But Now i got 3 speakers to work. Only 1 rear 1 front speaker and my center speaker work. I'm not sure why but the OSSmixer doesn't recognize the green jack input to be for both (2) speakers in the front or the black/grey input to be for 2 rear speakers and not just. Anyway to tell the program that there are 2?


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## RobLinux (Nov 7, 2007)

Shouldn't you be using an ALSA mixer, not OSS? OSS is deprecated in 2.6 kernel, and using some compability layer will hide some ALSA features. I've noticed KDE4 understands the HDA better than KDE3.5, perhaps 1 part of your software stack is not 5.1 capable, in which case you need to use an alternative.


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## blue4paper (Aug 11, 2007)

So theres no configuration for 5.1?

Also i posted on ubuntuforums.org and one person told me to 

"
Code:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/oss/conf/vmix.conf

and remove the '#' in front of the vmix_multich_enable=1 line"

But since doing that my sound is distored cracking and after 5 seconds my ubuntu slows down to a crawl. I tried undoing what i did but it didn't fix things>.>


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## RobLinux (Nov 7, 2007)

OSS is Open Sound System, and is the *old* Linux 2.0 way of doing things, I used ALSA (ported) as an addition to SuSE Linux in 2.2 nevermind 2.4.

Any source compiling of ALSA, kernel driverrs will also require using the tools that use the new API features. Don't you have an alsamixer program, to see what's offered by the software near to the driver (it used to be text terminal based) ?

I'm rather dubious about the benefits of updating Gutsy low level software, as it's pretty recent, without some specific application audio setup in mind which says it requires it. But then I'm happy if the front & rear speakers work (with woofer) rather than trying for a perfectionist Audio setup.

Sounds like your edit triggered a driver bug, you'ld most likely have to unload the driver module and reload, or reboot after altering the file back to improve things.

Fraid I can't offer much else in way of suggestions, as this multi-media stuff is not a real interest area of mine.


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## blue4paper (Aug 11, 2007)

i see, well thanks anyways, i guess i'll have to be happy with 3/5 speakers working 

I'm thinking i probably should remove all the drivers and reload them. But i'm not exactly sure how. I tried removing the alsa-driver-1.0.15rc3 with "sudo apt remove" I'm not too sure on the commands either. 

Do you know any good tutorials or do you yourself know how to unload them?


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## RobLinux (Nov 7, 2007)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto suggests in "Extra Hints" it talks about changing Mixer preferences to "ALSA mixer". It's been recently editted to so seems like 1.0.15-rc3 should work OK. Your question about directories, I think /usr/src/alsa probably is required, because it's likely to think it's next door to the linux source in /usr/src/linux. Looking at http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page seems they're up to 1.0.15 released 2007/10/16.

So OSS is still released by the vendor, but with some pay versions, it shows you how to remove ALSA, similar commands should allow you to remove any OSS packages you installed. Then you can re-install the default distro stuff, or which ever "latest & greatest" you want.

The Linux Documentation Project, and the Ubuntu sites have lots of tutorials.

Without knowing the politics, and latest state of Linux audio; it's very hard to offer solid advice. OSS used to be limitted, and ALSA offered more hardware features.

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/SurroundSound has info about 5.1. So it should be doable, and I'd try using the low level ALSA tools first, then when that's working, see which applications let you pass surround51 as the PCM name.


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## jamlamb (Jan 12, 2008)

I was having a similar problem. I was playing back video's with Totem and set the preference for 5.1 audio. When the movie started the audio would stop on the digital output. I was still getting output on the headphone jacks on the computer. If I set the audio preference in Totem to be Stereo I got audio on the digital output. I ultimately learned that the switch for digital output had to be on(checked) in the audio control panel and the preference in Totem had to be AC3 passthru. Now I'm getting surround on DVD playback. Don't know if that helps.


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## riger99 (Mar 6, 2008)

There's an easy solution here (it worked for me): http://ubuntulinuxhelp.com/the-simple-way-to-get-51-surround-sound-audio-working-in-ubuntu/
Hopefully it will help you too.


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## RobLinux (Nov 7, 2007)

I stumbled across 5.1 surround sound option after making previous response posts, running some KDE software, and an article advocating using ALSA directly.

Applications have perhaps made things confusing for end users, by supporting too many options, ALSA, OSS, sound daemons like aRts, meaning that many layers of a software stack may cause loss of functionality through tendency to support "Lowest Common Denominator".

KDE4, and the latest KDE3.5.9 seems to support my HD sound better than the 3.5.7 release I was using at time, and with there being buzz around things like PulseAudio to, this appears to be an area of progress.


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## diablo75 (Sep 7, 2006)

I hope Pulse Audio takes care of stuff like this in the future...


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