Switching between 4.0 and 5.1 playback

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staygroovy

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Here's a question for the more experienced computer users.

I have most of my media saved as ISOs, and was curious on what the best way to play things that have different channel assignment via Foobar2000 on a PC.

My current system is wired for 5.1 (Lf, Rf, C, LFE, Lr, Rr) and I am curious what people recommend doing to play Quad recordings that are formatted as (Lf, Rf, Lr, Rr), they would obviously need to be re-channelized to (Lf, Rf, xx, xx, Lr, Rr)
Is there a plug-in or utility that allows users to do this with Foobar 'on-the-fly', so that I can use the same system to deal with 4.0 and 5.1 ?

Sorry if this has been answered previously, but could not find it easily. Looked through the list of plug-ins, and also tried reading Hydrogen Audio and couldn't find hints.
 
Unless I misunderstand your question - all you really need to do is press play, no? If there are only four channels, that's what you'll hear.

On playing a 4.0 file, the output assignment is automatically re-routed to (1, 2, 5, 6) and skipping (3, 4) ?

Is there something in the meta-data that holds this information and passes it on to Foobar2000?
 
4.0 is understood to be L,R,Ls,Rs. Foobar knows where your channels are and routes them accordingly.
 
4.0 is understood to be L,R,Ls,Rs. Foobar knows where your channels are and routes them accordingly.

Thanks! You're so right... Guess I'm feeling pretty dumb for not even trying at all.

What happens when I try and play a 5-ch recording? I have a couple of 4.1 ones, and also some that are listed as being 5.0

Is there a setting somewhere for all of this in Foobar, or is it something that it reads from metadata, or a behavior that is automatically assumed from the number of channels?

Also, if I mount a DVD-A ISO image and try to play it in Foobar2000 (with the proper DVD-A playback extension installed), is there no way to parse song titles and such, or do they always come up as generic 'track 01' 'track 02' ?
 
You can check your channel assignments in the File/Preferences/Playback/Output menu. The menu will look different depending on your interface. Mine is ASIO and I select the interface and click edit to adjust the channel assignments.
 
You can check your channel assignments in the File/Preferences/Playback/Output menu. The menu will look different depending on your interface. Mine is ASIO and I select the interface and click edit to adjust the channel assignments.

Yes, thanks for the details.

Sadly right now and in my case that menu is not really available because I made '5.1' the default choice in Windows>Control Panel>Sound (Vista), and use 'Primary Sound Driver' as a device in the output menu from within Foobar2000.

I can certainly do this direct assignment to my sound card's outputs in Audition and other audio software, but not in Foobar2000.

Anyway, it's working so for now sort of low-priority for me to be able to remap things of not. Was just curious as to how other people deal with this. (Incidentally I am more used to OS-X, which has an abstraction layer and where multiple apps can address the same audio resource at the same time, which I don't think is quite the case under Windows)
 
I've never had to make adjustments of any kind in Foobar to play 2, 4, 5, or 5.1 on all 3 of my machines. This is true whether XP or WIN 7-I skipped Vista entirely. "Primary Sound Driver" should be what ever you have currently selected through either Windows or your Sound drivers interface-I've never had to change this for the most part except if switching back and forth between my optical and analog outputs. Both analog and HDMI seem to get picked up immediately without any adjustments in Foo, but I'm using onboard Realtek or Realtek/ATI HDMI drivers through my video card for the most part these days.
 
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