[DoctorDyna]

Those who have been plagued with broken ALSA upgrades and unsupported soundcards will be happy to know that these issues have been resolved.

Not really.

I was having issues with beta 2, so you could imagine my happiness when I read this line.

Unfortunately, no matter what combination of settings I use, my Yamaha receiver at the other end of my toslink fiber (creative x-fi live drive toslink output) will only emit nasty pulsating static, at best. I had a thread going where a kind member was trying to assist me, however after dancing around for weeks with alsa configurations, asoundrc tricks, "what does aplay -l say" responses and many, many beers, I just wanna know...

Has anyone else ever been able to successfully get DTS / Dolby Digital or (lord help us) even DD PLIIex signals to pass through from a creative x-fi sound card?

It should also be noted that downloading mplayer and issuing the command -hwac3 will work perfectly as it should with any file I throw at it, lighting up all the speakers with no goofy downmixing / analog fakery and sound great.

[DoctorDyna]

Nobody at all?

[DoctorDyna]

Bump. This is kinda depressing.

[dan1son]

Never tried it with that card. But I get optical playback on a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro, and through the Apple TVs optical out just fine. DD, DTS, stereo AAC/MP3/OGG, and even 5.1 AAC/MP3/FLAC works with the new builds.

Nasty static is usually because the format is wrong, as in the sound card is dumping out something the receiver can't decode. Make sure you have mp3 and aac passthrough turned off, and try 2.0 channels instead of 5.1. I've had issues with that in the past (although it seems to work as expected with beta3).

[DoctorDyna]

Never tried it with that card. But I get optical playback on a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro, and through the Apple TVs optical out just fine. DD, DTS, stereo AAC/MP3/OGG, and even 5.1 AAC/MP3/FLAC works with the new builds.

Nasty static is usually because the format is wrong, as in the sound card is dumping out something the receiver can't decode. Make sure you have mp3 and aac passthrough turned off, and try 2.0 channels instead of 5.1. I've had issues with that in the past (although it seems to work as expected with beta3).

yeah, it's beta 3 I'm working with now, I'll mess with those settings tomorrow, although I'm reasonably sure I have already, along with every combination I could come up with in that configuration screen.

EDIT: Maybe I should get an apple tv, from what I've been hearing, there should be plenty of them on sale as open box items.

[DoctorDyna]

Nasty static is usually because the format is wrong, as in the sound card is dumping out something the receiver can't decode. Make sure you have mp3 and aac passthrough turned off

Bump.

I dug around in there again and I can't seem to find any configuration options that let me change any attributes concerning mp3 and aac passthrough.

Mp3 plays fine though. The only mp3/wav that emits static is one that's encoded with DD/DTS, and only when played through the player in xbmc.

I'm left thinking that whatever player is being used by xbmc (DVDplayer?) is sending something different to the toslink cable than mplayer does. I'm going to assume that no amount of .asoundrc or alsa.conf fussing is going to correct it, as mplayer seems to be working fine, unless there is a configuration parameter that will allow application specific overrides.

If one application uses my sound configuration flawlessly and one does not, we have to assume the application (DVDPlayer) is at fault? Or is my logic flawed?

[dan1son]

You can also try turning off pulseaudio (if you haven't already) which means completely remove it from the system. It can do funky things to your audio path, and XBMC will use it if it's on as far as I know. It'll even start it up if it's shut down.

pulseaudio tries to take a bunch of streams at once and throw them out through the same output. I've never gotten it to work with passthrough.

[DoctorDyna]

You can also try turning off pulseaudio (if you haven't already) which means completely remove it from the system. It can do funky things to your audio path, and XBMC will use it if it's on as far as I know. It'll even start it up if it's shut down.

pulseaudio tries to take a bunch of streams at once and throw them out through the same output. I've never gotten it to work with passthrough.

Code:

xbmc@XBMCLive:~$ sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
[sudo] password for xbmc:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package pulseaudio is not installed, so not removed
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

*sigh*

[DoctorDyna]

Anyone else have an idea?

Since pulseaudio wasn't installed, would it be bad to try and install it and see what happens?

[xbmcuser01]

If one application uses my sound configuration flawlessly and one does not, we have to assume the application is at fault? Or is my logic flawed?

You proved that your hardware/amplifier is not at fault. Neither is your system config (read: alsa). Since you also do not have pulseaudio installed I'm pretty much out of suggestions. see the separate How To I made about dig. passtru.

What is your setup exactly? Did you install Linux on your Linux PC? Or do you use a Live XBMC cd/usb stick? I don't know exactly how all that xbmc life stuff works.

The only thing I can think of is: two audio cards? One on your MoBo and aforementioned Creative SoundCrd in a PCI slot? Or maybe there IS some PulseAudio thins left over on your system. Can you start up Synaptic and do a search for the word "pulse" and determine if anything's installed?

You are spot on about one thing: Xbmc sends a different signal to your Receiver than mplayer. Have you tried fiddling w/ Alsamixer or the Audio settings in Xbmc? See my How To. some how Xbmc MUST find the right hardware device to send it's digital audio stream to.

Good luck!

PS I wouldn't install PA if I were you. Chances of it working w/ dig. passtru are dim and it would only complicate things...

[DoctorDyna]

You proved that your hardware/amplifier is not at fault. Neither is your system config (read: alsa). Since you also do not have pulseaudio installed I'm pretty much out of suggestions. see the separate How To I made about dig. passtru.

What is your setup exactly? Did you install Linux on your Linux PC? Or do you use a Live XBMC cd/usb stick? I don't know exactly how all that xbmc life stuff works.

It's a bootable cd that installs using what looks like the text based ubuntu install. It comes up to xbmc instead of gnome.

The only thing I can think of is: two audio cards? One on your MoBo and aforementioned Creative SoundCrd in a PCI slot? Or maybe there IS some PulseAudio thins left over on your system. Can you start up Synaptic and do a search for the word "pulse" and determine if anything's installed?

I'm pretty much limited to the command line, I think. The ac97 chip that's built into my mainboard is disabled in the bios and it's not listed on the pci bus or in alsa.

You are spot on about one thing: Xbmc sends a different signal to your Receiver than mplayer. Have you tried fiddling w/ Alsamixer or the Audio settings in Xbmc? See my How To. some how Xbmc MUST find the right hardware device to send it's digital audio stream to.

Good luck!

PS I wouldn't install PA if I were you. Chances of it working w/ dig. passtru are dim and it would only complicate things...

I actually tried every output that's listed in xbmc for passthrough and the only one that's not "failed to initialize audio device" is the one that's listed as Creative X-Fi IEC958". That one will give me the "passthrough device in use" error when I try to adjust the volume as expected, but all I get is nasty static and screeching.

The sound it makes is exactly the same sound I get if I accidentally try feeding too high of a bitrate to my old Aragon D2A converter, like when I turn it on and there's a blu ray disc in my player instead of an audio cd.

[harryzimm]

have you tried using a custom device in xbmc?

[uomiarz]

Music files (mp3/wav/dts/flac...) are played by PAPlayer (not DVDplayer)
The only way to get 5.1 wav and flacs to play correctly is to force XBMC to use DVDplayer (as PAPlayer-default is not able to play them)
Press "c" on your 5.1 wav file and choose "play using..." and pick DVDplayer from list.
Make sure your XBMC audio is all the way up (or you get static noise)
Depending on who encoded a file some of them are passthorugh to your receiver (you can not regulate volume then) and some will be decoded by XBMC and send to your reciver (then you have to have XBMC audio maxed out)
I don't have creative card BTW but 5.1 standalone wav files never played correctly in PAPlayer.
You can force XBMC to use DVDplayer to play wavs/dts/flac all the time.

[DoctorDyna]

have you tried using a custom device in xbmc?

Oh yes. And I even told mplayer to use it from the command line and all my files played fine, but xbmc would only give me screeching. Granted, that was in beta 2, I haven't messed with it again in beta 3. EDIT: But, if I tell mplayer to play the files without telling it anything but the filename and -hwac3 it works like a charm.

Music files (mp3/wav/dts/flac...) are played by PAPlayer (not DVDplayer)
The only way to get 5.1 wav and flacs to play correctly is to force XBMC to use DVDplayer (as PAPlayer-default is not able to play them)
Press "c" on your 5.1 wav file and choose "play using..." and pick DVDplayer from list.
Make sure your XBMC audio is all the way up (or you get static noise)
Depending on who encoded a file some of them are passthorugh to your receiver (you can not regulate volume then) and some will be decoded by XBMC and send to your reciver (then you have to have XBMC audio maxed out)
I don't have creative card BTW but 5.1 standalone wav files never played correctly in PAPlayer.
You can force XBMC to use DVDplayer to play wavs/dts/flac all the time.

Excellent! Let me go see what it does right now.... Norrlanda.wav from here DTS encoded wav. Static in DVDPlayer, crappy downmixed 2 channel in PAPlayer.

I'm curious. If the standard audio player can't handle multichannel audio, why was it chosen as the application of choice?

[xbmcuser01]

I've downloaded the XBMC Live CD and booted my PC with it. It uses Ubuntu 9.10 as its base and when I close xbmc I'm left with a login prompt. However, I do not know how to log in! Me don't know no loginname nor a passwd!

Anyway, since its Ubuntu based chances are pulseaudio is installed per default.

I suggest:

• Make an xbmc live USB disk: it can save changes on it (a CD cannot!).
  
• Use xbmc for Win if you are a Windows user.
  
• Install Ubuntu Linux alongside w/ Win. BACKUP your data first!!!!!!
  

Good luck

P.S. Who made that xbmc live thingy?? Can he or she reply? Does xbmc live have its own forum/website?? I see many a question of xbmc live users but no-one here seems to know exactly how it works.