With a new installation of Debian Stretch with KDE, playing audio was difficult. The only thing that worked was VLC because it talked directly to the hardware.
EagleDM had a few things to say with his article: HowTo] Pulse Audio + X-Fi + K.Koala = Multichannel .
Change /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to reflect the following:"X-Fi works but not in Multichannel due to problems with PulseAudio and the way the X-Fi driver is made."
"X-Fi contrary to the rest of the most common linux drivers is made in a basis of addin "sub-devices" inside the master device, so, basically, PulseAudio has no way to detect that devices (the common Plug51 and Surround51 does NOT work) so, one has to MANUALLY add each sub-device of X-Fi to obtain perfect mapping of all channels."
The changes ... "should put a STOP to PulseAudio trying to detect devices on his own which is the main cause of the lack of 5.1."
"With this setup you are MANUALLY setting up each sub-device with each channel mapping to obtain perfect 5.1 through PulseAudio, the reason I mapped Side channels instead of Surround is because X-Fi uses the typical "surround" channels in a 5.1 configuration as "Side channels", if you need 7.1 instead of 5.1 you can ADD the line "channels=2 channel_map=rear-left,rear-right to the hw=0,1 and change the default channels to 8 in daemon.conf but DO NOT do this for 5.1 since Side channels behave as rear or surround in a 5.1 configuration. (the surround channels MUST be connected to Side Speakers in the X-Fi back)."
Change /etc/pulse/default.pa to reflect the following:default-sample-format = s16le default-sample-rate = 48000 default-sample-channels = 6 default-fragments = 8 default-fragment-size-msec = 10
### Load audio drivers statically (it's probably better to not load ### these drivers manually, but instead use module-hal-detect -- ### see below -- for doing this automatically) load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,0 channels=2 channel_map=front-left,front-right #load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,1 (this is for surround or Back channels in 7.1, no need to put this line in 5.1 setup) load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,2 channels=2 channel_map=center,lfe load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,3 channels=2 channel_map=side-left,side-right
I reboot, and now the browser plays music. The Media panel still doesn't see stuff though, nor can I do speaker tests through it.
Afterwords, I
This provided access to paprefs, pavucontrol, pavumeter, and padevchooser for more direct access to PulseAudio stuff than through Phonon, the KDE multimedia thing, which is said to be still under development.sudo apt-get install padevchooser
Reddit Comments indicate that ALSA is broken and behaves bad with low power devices. And PulseAudio works better from a conversion and buffering approach.
So, next time around, something newer than the X-Fi cards.
- Debian PulseAudio Wiki
- Debian Sound Wiki: which has a link to some interesting Sound and Midi Software for Linux
- Ubuntu Multiple Sound Solution (ALSA w Pulseaudio)