Re: Playing multichannel audio files

Rodolfo Medina <[email protected]> writes:

> Jeremy Nicoll - ml sox users <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> On 2018-03-06 09:08, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
>>> Hi all sox users.
>>>
>>> I have a multichannel audio file: suppose three channels.  What I want is
>>> to listen to that file by listening to each of those channels through a
>>> different loud speaker.  In order to do so, I imagine
>
> ...though I may be wrong...
>
>
>>> each channel being sent to a different sound card.  Can sox perform that,
>>> and how?  In sox manual I couldn't find an answer.
>>
>> What sound hardware does your computer have?  Do you actually have more than
>> one soundcard?
>>
>> Since you posted on Debian-Users, is there a way in Debian to list what these
>> separate sound devices' names are?
>
> Two different soundcards, and three devices, seem to be detected:
>
> $ arecord -l
> **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
> card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC662 rev3 Analog [ALC662 rev3
> Analog]
>   Subdevices: 1/1
>   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 2: ALC662 rev3 Alt Analog [ALC662
> rev3 Alt Analog]
>   Subdevices: 1/1
>   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> card 2: Device [USB Audio Device], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
>   Subdevices: 0/1
>   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
>
>
>> Do you have a way (forgetting your audio file for a moment) of getting sound
>> out to three separate places?
>
> If I could have sox (or any other software) send different channel outputs to
> different soundcards, I could think of plugging a loud speaker into each
> soundcard and so getting sound out to three separate places...
>
>
>> Do you have any other sound-playing software?
>
> I normally use mplayer to play sound.


Since sox can split a three-channel file into three one-channel files, the
problem is virtually solved once we manage to send two audio outputs into two
different audio cards.  This seems to be done simply with `&&', e.g:

 $ mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=2.0 file1.wav && mplayer file2.wav

, but unfortunately only one output is heard at a time...

Rodolfo

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