Windows Audio 5.1 & 2.0

Hi all,

I have an weird problem with the audio.

I have an creative SoundBlaster audio card witch is able to upmix 2.0 audio input to 5.1 audio output. (duplicate front to rear).
And that works fine when i play music and 2.0 video files (and even the menu click sounds to ).

The problem starts after when I have watched a video file with 5.1 surround. After that the music (and all other XBMC sounds) are only again on the 2 frond speakers.

Situation 1:
Music 2.0 - Upmixed to 5.1 by soundblaster - All speaker produce sound.
Video 2.0 - Upmixed to 5.1 by soundblaster - All speaker produce sound.
Music 2.0 - Upmixed to 5.1 by soundblaster - All speaker produce sound.

Situation 2:
Music 2.0 - Upmixed to 5.1 by soundblaster - All speaker produce sound.
Video 5.1 - Played properly by XBMC - All speaker produce sound.
Music 2.0 - Not upmixed any more. - Only front left & front right

I can fix the second situation by restarting XBMC, after I watched video. But that is a pain on a remote.

Is there a way to fix this?
Or is this a bug in XBMC, that it doesn't refer back to the proper audio channels?

That'd be a Creative driver problem then.

can you explain that a little more?

Because i think that afterwards XBMC keeps outputting 5.1 despite that music is 2.0. I can of course can be completely wrong.

what are your sound settings in XBMC? Should be 2.0 as you don't have a true 5.1 capable receiver.

My sound settings in XBMC is 5.1. because I have a 5.1 surround system (3x jack plug).

XBMC doesn't upmix right now, it's your Creative driver doing that. So when you play a Dolby or DTS track presumably you are passing through the encoded data for your soundcard to decode. Once the "passthrough" format is done, XBMC will output 2.0 as it did before the movie was played. But it sounds like the Creative driver forgets it was set to upmix. That's about all I can infer without knowing your audio settings in XBMC, Win and the Creative panel. If you post screenshots of each of those and a debug log I could say more definitively.

Alternatively you can try my Windows build of the AudioEngine branch - you'll see a thread to follow in the Development section. Be advised it's not 100% yet, and you need to know a bit about advancedsettings.xml etc, but it will do the upmix for you, including of 2.0 movies with mp3 or flac audio.