Karmic surround sound confusion

[Sammiel]

Hey all,

I am rather confused with the whole sound thing in Ubuntu 9.10. I have just cleaned my system and having the issues with the working of sound
I think ALSA is works fine when I have changed the output to analog stereo, but the digital sound does not seems to work fine and I have no idea how to get 5.1-surround working. How can I get my surround sound working though?
Any related reply for the Karmic surround sound confusion problem appreciated.

[Devasis]

My friend,

Pulse audio is new and the latest sound system. ALSA runs underneath pulse audio hence it will be compatible with their respective applications. The karmic sound applet has does not comes with any button to switch from analog to digital output but it can be achieved using some cards through the old alsamixer. For 5.1 pass through, for the time being select the profile "off" or a non-digital profile for your soundcard while using the applet.

[Solomon]

Using the method mentioned in the above reply you will be able to get the sound file but if you are using Lenovo Y530. I am saying this because I am using Lenovo Y530. If you want to get the sound then you have to the following.

Assuming that your sound card is device 0 you have to do some thing like this:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 -ac hwac3 FILENAME

[MrChris-]

Firefox is saying that any flash is using the ALSA plug-in. How can I use pulse? In addition, I do not need to set channels=6 anywhere for alsa or something like that? I thought that I still had to set surround sound via alsa, even if I was using pulse?

My digital output is also not working, only analog does, and in alsamixer, it is displaying following thing

Card: HDA NVidia
Chip: Analog Devices AD1986A
View: [Playback] Capture All
Item: Master [dB gain=0.00, 0.00]

[Lillebror]

Are you using a spdif output to a stereo? ...or a 5.1 channel speaker system attached to your computer's soundcard?

if you are using 5.1 speakers to your computer's soundcard...

then you must try to right-clicking the volume or the speaker icon in the top panel then in the sound preferences and then in the hardware tab

Now in the bottom of the window, click the up or the down arrow at the end of the profile line and then choose analog 5.1 output.

After that open a terminal and type the following command into to the test the speakers:

speaker-test -c6 -twav

I hope this will help you.