I've been informed that it is possible to get proper surround sound, such
as quadraphonic sound on sound cards that support rear speaker setups,
using a combination of ALSA and openal. I'm not a programmer, so I'm not
interested in development. I'm interested in taking advantage of this
feature where it's available, such as games that use openal.
Unfortunately, thus far I've not had any luck making things work. I'm
using ALSA modules for the emu10k1 driver (loaded as modules) for my Sound
Blaster Live! card, and I have four speakers connected. I can adjust the
volume for the front and rear speakers independently. I have openal, I
have a special modified openal library from
http://students.imsa.edu/~jrockway/ (supposedly this provides better
surround quality). Unfortunately, I'm not detecting any actual surround
sound output. It seems as though it's outputting in two-channel stereo
instead, just putting the right and left channels in the respective front
and rear speakers.
A little bit of listen-testing has led me to believe (though I am not
certain, because I can't get any openal demos to work -- the sample ones
provided with the source code won't compile for some reason) that the
driver is trying to output surround sound, but for some reason it's
putting the sounds for the front speakers into both the front and rear
channels, and the sounds for the rear speakers are just getting lost. I
noticed in Unreal Tournament 2004 (a game that supposedly supprots
openal), sounds for objects in front of me were audible, but if I turned
around, they got very quiet, like the channel on which the sound was to be
put out wasn't available. Again, I've no demo or test software, so I
can't say for certain.
If anyone knows of proper mixer settings (either with KDE's mixer or the
console-based alsamixer), I'd love to try them out. I'd also not mind
being pointed to WORKING openal test/demo programs.
--
See the documented lies of Pastor Frank: http://tinyurl.com/6009
Christopher Byron (cbyron@nypost.com) thinks that a video game is
"10,000 times worse" than child molestation: http://tinyurl.com/37j8f
d a r k s t a r @ i g l o u . c o m | atheist #29
