Arch Linux

beuk

Member

Registered: 2011-12-22

Posts: 4

Alsa surround or pulse?

Today I fixed a problem I had for a few months and it really doesn;t make me happy...

A couple of months back I removed pulse because i couldn;t get it to play nicely with a multiheader setup, I removed pulse and setup alsa and all things played along nicely except surround sound on a spdif digital output, I could only get 2 speakers to work. This week I finally had time to spend to fix it, and tried everything, changed drivers, used a lot of different config-settings for alsa  but never managed to get sound out of 6 speakers, last night I gave pulse a try and the first guide I used instantly gave me surround sound, so now I'm really puzzeled, why does surround work with pulse and not with alsa? Is there anyone here that managed to get surround out of spdif (preferably with my snd-hda-intel vt1708s chip) in alsa? or can;t it be done and should I make the most of it with pulse? Any suggestions?

edit: A weekend of irritation with pulse on my multiheader was enough to get me motivated, Instead of using other peoples brains, I finally used my own, read the documentation and finally got an asound.conf that worked.

snipped from my asound.conf for others

 pcm.!default { 
   type plug 
   slave.pcm surroundaudio 
} 

ctl.!default { 
   type plug 
   slave.pcm surroundaudio 
} 

pcm.a52encode { 
   type a52 
   #format S16_LE 
   channels 6 
   rate 48000 
   bitrate 448 
} 

pcm.surroundaudio { 
   type upmix 
   slave.pcm a52encode 
   channels 6 
}

Last edited by beuk (2012-03-19 14:26:06)