Aqua-Soft ForumsHello, I am new to this forums and it looks pretty cool so far, seems to have nice people on here who are helpful and nice. I got a question, I noticed that my 2 front speakers only work in 5.1 surround sound effect, this is confusing. I went and downloaded winamp, a new release of it came out and it supports 5.1 surround sound, all my speakers work fine, but I like iTunes better. Is there any plugins I can download to enable 5.1 surround or no?
iTunes 6.0.4.2 5.1 surround sound?
Yeh... you can Download Multi-Plugin for iTunes.... and download app called Foobar. Then you can select Foobar Passthrough using Multi-Plugin for iTunes and enable 5.1 output from foobar.
Please Note : Multi-Plugin currently doesn't support Foobar 0.9 (which is recently released), so make sure you download Foobar 0.8.3 !!
Yeh... you can Download Multi-Plugin for iTunes.... and download app called Foobar. Then you can select Foobar Passthrough using Multi-Plugin for iTunes and enable 5.1 output from foobar.Please Note : Multi-Plugin currently doesn't support Foobar 0.9 (which is recently released), so make sure you download Foobar 0.8.3 !!
I got it working, enabled what you told me to enable, now what, sound does not work anymore. Foobar 2000 is opened and I hear nothing, no sound at all.
you can't have Foobar opened when you enable the Foobar passthrough
You cannot get real 5.1 sound with stereo mp3 files. All you will get is stereo sound duplicated onto the back speakers with the center one numb.
This has nothing to do with iTunes or WinAmp and i assume that iTunes simply uses just 2 (stereo, front) speakers for stereo files and WinAmp simply mirrors it to the back speakers to achieve pseudo 5.1 effect.
So what will give you actual surround sound if mp3's don't?
AC3 audio (filter here - http://ac3filter.sourceforge.net/) will give surround sound. I think there is a multi channel hack of mp3 but nobody encodes in multichannel unless they have a multichannel source (generally very rare for music).
I remember Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon & Led Zepplin's The Song Remains the same coming out in Quadrophonic Sound on record. (Many Moons Ago) 
Yeah. You need a 5.1 source to have full 5.1 sound which is something not very common for music.
hmm, i have 5.1 logitech speakers and all i did was config quicktime to use 5.1, since itunes uses quicktime. just goto controll panel>quicktime>audio tab>channels(set to 5.1) i dont know if this did anything also but i set the windows sound whatever ya call it to 5.1 by going to controll panel>sounds and audio devices>advance settings under speaker settings and set that to 5.1. hope that helps.
dpsleep
All i do to get all speakers producing sound ( i generally do it to get more noise around me 
) is set CMSS 3D on in my Soundcard options. May only be creative soundcards only though.
at one point wma's came out w/ digital 5.1 support... this was ages ago and required windows media player... the only way i know of getting "surround" sound w/ typical 48khz sampled tracks is to emulate using a processor like above. this is obviously not true surround. most people are correct in saying that cds and such are generally not encoded in 5.1 simply because of the sampling and data restrictions of a cd. not to mention you only have so many sources to record and stereo channels are "good enough". you could always check out super audio or dvd-audio discs for true digital surround. check your soundcard/motherboard settings (s/pdif) to enable seperate channel decoding...