The SB live is designed to generate surround audio from a mono or stereo
source, which is what the games people want. The fact that you get a
quad ~output~ does not necessarily mean you can give it a quad ~input~.

Any card which provides a single quad WAVE device can be used by Csound
to play a quad file.

The free Multi-Channel Toolkit (Win32 console) available from the CDP
website includes a program 'playsfx' which will report the number of
channels supported by each WAVE device on the system. Where N channels
are supported by a device, playsfx can play an N-channel file.

More to the point, if a device supports a quad file, you can play the
file using Media Player - you don't need any third-party application.

Unfortunately, some cards (where the driver-writers were lazy) will
acccept a quad file even when they shouldn't - it may come out at half
speed, or worse.

Richard Dobson


Tobiah wrote:
> 
> I got the definitive answer about that from their qualified
> tech support staff:
> 
>         "Oh...  I don't know about *that*...
> 
> It is obvious to me that it can be done, because Half-life and
> other games do it.  It is just a matter of finding a player that
> can do it with quad files.  I can't find one.
> 
> richard bowers wrote:
> >
> > I hope this is roughly on-topic, but does anyone know if the SBLive card can
> > be fed quad sound from csound ie. can you address the four speaker channels
> > using a quad output from csound?

-- 
Test your DAW with my Soundcard Attrition Page!
http://wkweb5.cableinet.co.uk/rwd (LU: 6th July 1999)