Turn on 5.1 in Pulse Audio

Recently, I was asked at Habré how to enable 5.1 in Pulse Audio. I decided to write instead of answering a small post, maybe someone else will come in handy, since I myself have been searching for a long time, albeit for a long time, maybe now with simpler information.

And it's easy enough to turn everything on - via sound settings (in my case System> Preferences> Sound) we force all programs to use Pulse Audio by default, then edit the Pulse Audio config - sudo gedit (or any other editor) etc / pulse / daemon. conf , Find the line “default-sample-channels”, it will need to be uncommented and set the desired number of channels. Those. for 5.1 it will be 6 , for 7.1 respectively 8. Save, reboot the system and enjoy.

There are some nuances - on my system, the stereo also became decomposed into five channels, and not just the stereo in front and behind, but somehow cunning, like CMSS-3d (I have Audigy). I didn’t look for a way to ban stereo layouts, I’m quite happy with it, but someone may not like it. The second caveat - a software volume control, at least for me, was damaged by the mind, and the speakers began to hiss and squeak at full volume. I just put it at 50% of the maximum and everything became normal, for sure there is a more beautiful solution, but I have not yet looked.
')
Finally I would like to ask another question - did anyone use pulse with two sound cards? From the non-default one is only required to play music using any convenient player. I still have no way to configure, only with the help of some terrible crutches - either through Winamp in Vine (sic!), Or through audacious using oss output, which is ugly and slow (using pulse output plugin does not work for the second) .