Sound Blaster audio problem
 

Hi,
the thing is this: I have a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 sound card and five speakers. I'm using the emu10k1 driver and having no sound issues what so ever. Except for this... I'm only getting sound from 2 of my 5 speakers. Sound from all of them using Windows. Does the driver simply not support more than 2 speakers? Do I need to configure it somehow? Is there an audiomixer that allows me to enable all of my speakers?
I'm not quite sure what information I should be giving here so if there's something you think could prove useful in solving this problem just tell me to post it. Thanks.

My guess is that you haven't unmuted the surround feature in alsa. Try this:

amixer set Master 100 unmute
amixer set PCM 100 unmute
amixer set Center 100 unmute
amixer set Surround 100 unmute

That will unmute all channels. Let us know if that works.

If you have a Dell computer system, and an emu10k1X sound card, then you have problems when using Linux. Dell hates Linux, and has designed this sytem to only use a single monopolistic operating system. Everything runs fine in Windows, but they included a "poison" proprietary sound card in their system. It is not a true SoundBlaster card, and will not give you the results that you may have expected.

Another reason I built my own PC. Anyway, another thing to try is to open a console and type alsamixer and check all the settings there. If you do have a Dell, I suppose you're out of luck.

Thanks for the quick responses.

Nope, I'm not using a Dell computer but wow, that's lame.
Anyways, I don't really have amixer and couldn't find it using "apt-cache search amixer" so I installed alsamixer and tried using that but I get this error when I try using it. Is this my problem?

Shutdown Alsamixer, and install Aumix. Check out the settings in Aumix, and see if they are (were) the same as the one for Alsamixer. If you get the same error message, then the problem is more broad then just one application, and the troubleshooting tactics will have to shift to accomodate this.

Hey, thanks.
Adjusting "OGain" in aumix did the trick. :)
Although no matter what setting I adjust I can't get the center speaker to work.
But hey, 4 out of 5 isn't too bad.

Oh, yeah and Crashed_Again, when I try to setup amix I get an error telling me I don't have an ALSA device. Which I don't. I think. Unless Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 is an ALSA device?