Is there a quick way to enable my sound system to play through all 5 speakers instead of just 2.
Probably something stupid i missed
I am running lenny with xfce and compiz fusion and everything is running really smooth. I knackered up my xorg.conf yesterday after all was perfect by running the xorg config but evrything was good again after using cp to use the saved config and a quick reboot.
Unless I'm mistaken, enabling surround and related channels just need to be activated through alsamixer, but, if that isn't the case, you could try playing with settings in the .asoundrc file, you can find some examples at http://alsa.opensrc.org/SurroundSound
Not sure what i did but after a bit of research downloaded a few players. Seems there maybe still a few bugs but depending on what i am playing and through which player i am using depends on how many speakers work
A list of media players installed....
Amarok
Audacious
Audi CD extractor
Gnomebaker CD/DVD Writer
Gxine
Movie Player
M Player
Real Player 10
Rhythmbox
Sound Recorder
Streamtuner
Vlcplayer
Xfmedia
Its just a case of now knowing which plays which type of file
To me that sounds more like compilation options used by package managers to create the players.
Debian by default (someone might correct me on this since I don't use debian in a while), isn't actually media support oriented, meaning that when it comes to media packages, most of them are created using very "common" options regarding media supported types by the different players
So, lets suppose that mplayer is compiled without aac support, a video that uses that as encoded sound will be watchable but unable to output sound
My point is that, the common set used to compile most players aren't always useful because encoding its very rich in this days, and the fact that you're telling that channels are used based on the player and media type, to me sound like lack of support to decoding some audio formats during package creation
I might be wrong, it's also possible that the player core doesn't support surround at all, but what I'm sure of is that isn't a problem in alsa/jack/pulseaudio/esound or whatever you use and also there's nothing wrong with your current channels configuration
