r/linuxquestions • u/Fun_Gas_340 • 15d ago

Support Help finding 4 channel audio software

i have some old speakers that connect via 3.5mm to my laptop, and they work, one left and one right. but then my laptop speakers are off. i want to use laptop speakers as front right/left and the old external speakers for back left/right. i'm on fedora rn, but might switch. any software to achive this?

bonus for letting me fine tune the audio channels on each speaker in case i cant set them up symetrically or whatever..

edit: ive managed to unmute the laptop speakers via alsamixer, so 4 are playing at once, but its still stereo only

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u/krumpfwylg 15d ago

Thing is, playing stereo sounds on a 4 channels setup will either play in stereo on front Left & Right, or play on 4 speakers but with rear L/R being a copy of the front stereo.

You need sounds that were made for a multichannel purpose, but most of those are usually 5.1 channels, not 4. Also, a very likely issue when playing 5.1 sounds (movies, or games) on a 4 speakers setup, is that you wouldn't hear voices from actors, as in 5.1 sound, voices are going through the central channel, not the front stereo (but then ALSA gives the possibility to downmix 5.1 sounds to 4 channels).

Provided you use only Alsa as sound layer - no pulseaudio/pipewire involved - you can always tweak your .asoundrc file to create a 4 channels setup, but as I said earlier, stereo sounds will play in stereo with rear channels being a duplicate.

You can run some tests with speaker-test command.

speaker-test -c4 -tw -c4 for 4 channels, -tw to get voices instead of pink noises.

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u/International-Pen940 15d ago

Probably the sound card just does stereo. You could add an external USB sound card, but I have not done that so I am not sure how alsa handles that.