Hi to everybody,

I am kind of new in linux and to alsa and I am facing a problem with the setup for 5.1 surround sound with my sound card Hercules Fortissimo III, recognized having the chip cs46xx. I have managed to enable surround sound by creating a .asounrc file with the followings

pcm.!default { type plug slave.pcm "surround51" slave.channels 6 route_policy duplicate }

The problem is that I am facing weird cpu load spikes (sometimes isn't just spikes, but just 99% usage for a long time!) even when just playing a normal mp3 file at 128Kbps. This is happening when playing with various players (totem,rhythbox,vlc). Also the sound has cracklings or there is a delay between the front and the rear speakers. i have send this email to alsa-users too, but since there wasn't anyone to propose a workaround I was adviced to also send it to alsa-devel. I am using the distro ubuntu 7.04 with the default alsa libraries version 1.0.13ubuntu5.

So, if anyone has any idea plz give me a hint, cause I am stuck with it about two weeks now, without having any clue to proceed with!!!

PS. If any other information or command output is necessary to help me, tell me so.