5.1 Audio in Ubuntu 8.04
When Ubuntu 8.04 hit the streets in April, I was really annoyed: They had a new sound server (pulseaudio) that was supposed to be the next big thing; Yet, my 5.1 setup stopped working. My workaround was to go back to a “stereo 4.0″ setup, using a hardware audio duplicator.
The last days, I regained confidence in the new sound server. It was working so fantastically in all situations, playing the sound of multiple users, flash, other apps flawlessly and without any hassles. So I decided to try again, maybe I had made some mistake. After all, if it was working so well most of the time, it can’t be coded to just support two audio channels, right?
Well, I had made one mistake: Trying to get 5.1 to work, I activated some surround setting of my card that kinda mixed up my audio channels. But I still had only 2.0 when going through pulseaudio. Then I found a hint in the Ubuntu Forums.
Just add the following to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf: default-sample-channels = 6
pulseaudio will default to 2 channels… this line makes it try to set 5.1. And yes, it works. That was easy. 
