PulseAudio and 5.1 surround sound on Hardy Heron

The new Ubuntu 8.04 look very good and has many improvements over the older releases. I will not discuss about them now. I’ll just stick on the new default sound server, PulseAudio that offers sophisticated mixing capabilities and network transparency.
The purpose of this post is to help other Ubuntu users to enable 5.1 surround sound on their computers, using PulseAudio (you must have a 5.1 capable sound card).
I have a Creative Labs SB Audigy sound card but I tested this solution on a Creative Labs SB Live!. The results were the same in both cases.
The solution is very simple. Run this in your terminal:

Uncomment the line containing:

and replace '2' with '6' (if you have a 7.1 card, replace '2' with '8')
Restart the window manager and enjoy the new sound!

  1. hey ive tried replacing the 2 with a six in tbe daemon.conf file but it has given me no results… in the preferences of the sound i do not even see the suroound center and rear optionss….

  2. i use ubuntu 8.10 by the way

  3. Run ‘speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -l1 -twav’ in your command line. That way you’ll know if you have 5.1 sound.

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