Using Fedora Core 2. Trying to play a movie with a 5.1 channel soundtrack with mplayer causes a high pitched hiss to come from all the speakers. I use the command

I've searched and searched, with no results.

Synaptic says I'm using the latest available alsa-lib and alsa-utils on the fedora mirrors.

I had to run alsamixer and move the pcm volume down below 75% before the static stopped.

Thanks, I tried that but it didn't fix it. I've played with all the settings in alsamixer and nothing seems to make it go away. Would it matter what ports the speaker cords are plugged into? I'm not sure if it would, but mine are like this:

If you're looking at the card with the joystick attachment on the far left, there are five ports to the right
the far right port (labeled optical) is center/lfe
two ports to the right of the joystick attachment is the front speakers
one port to the right of the joystick attachment (meaning right next to the joystick attachment) is the rear speakers

So there are two ports between the center/lfe and the front speakers that are unused. I think that's correct because alsamixer's controls for wave front, wave surround, etc control the correct speakers.

Does anyone have this sb live! card playing 6ch audio correctly?

Mute CD, Line, Video, Mic, Aux and other audio inputs because the emu10k1 chip is not very good seperating these inputs from the outputs as well as the cs46xx chips. You may want to adjust the AC97 too but if you are not carefull it will squeal. Though, Soundblaster Live has a signal to noise ratio lower than 80 dB, you will have to set the mixer settings near maximum. IMO, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sounds a lot better than any cards from Creative Labs and it is a lot easier to adjust the mixer settings.

I hope you are using shielded cables from the sound card to the amplifer because anything that is oscillating like AC will induce into the cable creating more problems.

There is not such thing as static in audio. What you are hearing is clipping. Clipping can destroy loudspeakers if you are not carefull.

Thanks for the info! I tried muting/toying around with all the different settings. Either the hiss and all sound disappears, or it's just a hiss. But...

Rumor has it we can only use oss for anything more than 2 channels. Either mplayer's documentation is out of date, or I'll have to fiddle with oss. So I should be doing

instead of

So it's likely it's _not_ my soundcard but actually mplayer.

Yes, I did use Creative Labs Soundblaster LIVE! but it gave me problems and poor sound quality. I remember that my Soundblaster LIVE did give me hissing problems when I used ALSA. I had enough with the that sound card and bought a sound card that does not have this problem. Lucky for me newegg was selling Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (OEM) for less than 40 dollars. I have mplayer 1.0pre5 (compiled) and it does not give me any hissing when I used ALSA (1.0.5a) with Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. The GUI for mplayer has problems using the mixer control library when the audio output is set to alsa, so I play videos or audios through the console. I made a few scripts to help me load up video, audio, and dvds with different options for each. Below is a portion of my scripts.

Video files with AC-3 audio codec:
mplayer -quiet -sws 1 -channels 6 -af-adv force=1 -af sub=120:5,delay=0:0:30:30:0:15 -nowaveheader -nobps -mc 0 -ni -idx -tskeepbroken -framedrop -vo xv -vf pp=hb/vb/dr/al/lb -ao alsa:device=surround51 -a52drc 0 -autosync 30 -audiofile-cache 16384 -cache 32768 $2 $1

DVD movies:
mplayer -quiet -sws 1 -channels 6 -af-adv force=1 -af delay=0:0:30:30:0:15 -framedrop -cache 32768 -audiofile-cache 16384 -autosync 30 -vo xv -vop pp=lb -ao alsa:device=surround51 -a52drc 0 $2 dvd://$1

If you want better sound quality at a low price, buy the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. If you want a sound card with poor sound quality and it does not work so well with ALSA use any Creative Lab sound cards.

Oh well, from your suggestion (and others on newegg), I should have gotten a santa cruz card. Bummer. I'd like to switch to that card considering I have to boot windows to watch movies in 6ch surround. If I got that card and it installed/configured without too much problem, I'd be nice.

Now, what should I do with this card I just bought (and lost the receipt)?

Hopefully this thread will show up on google (eventually) so others know that getting 6ch sound out of the soundblaster live! EMU10k1 chipset card in MPlayer with ALSA isn't a possibility right now.

Sell it on ebay or join the emu10k team for ALSA. You can direct the output to the digital output. Then get a digital to analog converter to hook to your amplifier.

Its not mplayer's fault. The ALSA library for the emu10k1 is at fault here. You can buy the OSS drivers.