HOWTO: surround playback with jack

[chrbecke]

Hi,
I was trying to get my MIDI keyboard playing through the wavetable of my SBLive Player 5.1 (and other stereo sources) to play on all 6 speakers of my 5.1 surround system using jack. Here's how to do it:

Hardware/Software:

• SBLive! PLayer 5.1 [SB0060] (rev.7)
  
• Fatar SL-880 Keyboard
  
• Creative Inspire 5.1 5100 Speakers
  

• gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r10
  
• realtime-lsm-0.8.5-r1
  
• alsa-drivers-1.0.9b
  
• jack-audio-connection-kit-0.99.0-r1
  
• qjackctl-0.2.14
  

alsamixer:
in the playback panel (press <F3> to get there):
Make sure "Master", "PCM", "Wave", "Wave Center", "Wave LFE" and "Wave Surround" are pulled up and "Synth" is pulled down completely.
in the capture panel (press <F4> to get there):
Make sure "Synth" is selected as capture device (toggle with <space>) and is pulled up.

qjackctl:
In the settings window, set "Interface" to "hw:0,0", "Input Device" to "hw:0,0" and "Output Device" to "hw:0,3"
If you now start jack, in the connect window, you get 2 output ports and 16 input ports.
The input ports are mapped to the speakers as follows:

1. Center, LFE, Front Left, Rear Left
   
2. Center, LFE, Front Right, Rear Right
   
3. Rear Left
   
4. Rear Right
   
5. (unknown)
   
6. (unknown)
   
7. Center
   
8. LFE
   

Wireing the devices in qjackctl
On the MIDI tab of the connection window, connect the MIDI output with the WaveTabel input. On the audio tab, connect alsa_pcm:capture_1 with alsa_pcm:playback_1 and alsa_pcm:capture_2 with alsa_pcm:playback_2. You should now get your MIDI sound on all 6 speakers.
For any other jack device with stereo outputs, just connect the left output with alsa_pcm:playback_1 and the right output with alsa_pcm:playback_2.

That's all, hope someone finds this useful.

[abester]

I'm going to give it a try, seems like it could help me with something
Good & nifty post!