No simple way to enable 4+ channel sound

[Graham Clenaghan]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

I recently setup a 5.1 speaker system and had trouble getting the rear/center speakers to play correctly/at all. After many google searches, most of which suggested putting on "Duplicate Front", which is not a solution at all, it simply plays 2 channel sound through all speakers (which will happen when 6 channel sound is enabled anyway if the source is not 6 channels), I found a blog post which said to uncomment and change the line
; default-sample-channels = 2

There should be a simpler way to do this.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

not a gnome-volume-manager bug.

[Craig (candrews-integralblue)]

Does this bug still occur?

[ssbastos (bastos-sergio)]

I have a 4.1 speaker system using an old audigy sound card, and I can confirm that this still happens in Ubuntu 9.04.

You can read more about the problem here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=795525

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

It's quite simple to do that in Karmic at least, just go to Sound preferences and select the right profile there. I've own a 5.1 sound system and that works awesome with that, does it works ok for you? please try in karmic and comment back, thanks.

[MarcRandolph (mrand)]

Howdy, we'd like to know if Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) has resolved this issue for you, but we have received a response. Could you report back any testing results?
Thanks!

[Graham Clenaghan (origin191)]

Yes, karmic deals with this very nicely (though now I suffer from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/445849 but that is a completely different story)

Thanks