Help Enabling Surround Sound with X-fi card

**Krumar** · February 20th, 2009

Hello,
I have a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro installed under Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 bit.

Here is the output of lspci -v

Code:

02:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB X-Fi
	Subsystem: Creative Labs Device 0023
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 18
	I/O ports at 8c00 [size=32]
	Memory at c3c00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M]
	Memory at bc000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64M]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: CTALSA
	Kernel modules: ctxfi

Right now the card is only playing sound through my front left and right speakers. I would like to set it up to play 5.1 to match my speakers. Right now I'm running the X-fi in conjunction with my motherboard's on-board sound card and using pulse audio to play them separately. I don't know if that changes anything, just wanted to try let you guys know everything I can about how I'm set up.

Can anyone help me with surround sound?

Thanks in advance,
Krumar

**MartyBuntu** · February 20th, 2009

Originally Posted by Krumar

Hello,
I have a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro installed under Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 bit.

Here is the output of lspci -v

Code:

02:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB X-Fi
	Subsystem: Creative Labs Device 0023
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 18
	I/O ports at 8c00 [size=32]
	Memory at c3c00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M]
	Memory at bc000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64M]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: CTALSA
	Kernel modules: ctxfi

Right now the card is only playing sound through my front left and right speakers. I would like to set it up to play 5.1 to match my speakers. Right now I'm running the X-fi in conjunction with my motherboard's on-board sound card and using pulse audio to play them separately. I don't know if that changes anything, just wanted to try let you guys know everything I can about how I'm set up.

Can anyone help me with surround sound?

Thanks in advance,
Krumar

There is no mature ALSA driver for X-FI cards that supports multi-channel...yet.

The working OSS driver does not support multi-channel I believe.

**catphive** · June 16th, 2009

That first reply is probably bogus. If you got this far, you already, like me, have the creative drivers installed probably. I doubt creative shipped without surround sound support...

In fact, this guy claims to have done it by switching to alsa sans pulse:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1159632

Although he doesn't really say everything he did to fix it.

I have the same problem on Ubuntu 9.04 x64. I do have the creative open source driver installed from creative's website. Only front speakers and sub work. Center and back do not.

I tried settings the number of channels to six as per here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=795525

Here's my lspci -v
0a:00.0 Audio device: Creative Labs [X-Fi Titanium series] EMU20k2 (rev 03)
Subsystem: Creative Labs Device 0044
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
Memory at fbff0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Memory at fbc00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M]
Memory at fa000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: CTALSA
Kernel modules: ctxfi

I can hear sound out of my front speakers, but for some reason speaker-test (following directions here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SurroundSound) gives me this:
speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -l1 -twav

speaker-test 1.0.18

Playback device is plug:surround51
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 6 channels
WAV file(s)
ALSA lib pcm.c:2205

snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround51
Playback open error: -2,No such file or directory
ALSA lib pcm.c:2205

snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround51
Playback open error: -2,No such file or directory

Maybe it's some kind of pulse audio configuration issue?