no 5.1/7.1/stereo surround upmixing sound

[Spaceowl]

Hello, I have a 7.1 sound system and a creative sound card. In the sound card options I have activated stereo upmix, so that stereo 2.0 sound is cloned and played at the side and rear speakers. This works in windows mediay players, for system sounds and some other programms.

In media player classic this doesn't work by default, I have to activate there upmixing in the options too to work.
Videos in chrome browser also play only stereo sound, unless I start chrome with the -try-supported-channel-layouts parameter, then surround sound works.

In wallpaper enigne video wallpapers work with umpixing, I can hear the sound on every speaker. But scene wallpaper only play sound on the front speakers :(

Is there a soluition to upmix the sound? A start parameter like in chrome? Or is it possible to twaek a configuration or ini file, registry setting?
Or do I have to make a suggestion für stereo upmix in the sugesstions sub forum?

[Biohazard]

Wallpaper Engine is just using the default audio device, I'm assuming what you are doing should take that sound and instead of actually making it audible through your speakers, it should upmix it and then output it in surround?

The only thing I can suggest is to check the advanced audio settings in Windows here: https://www.howtogeek.com/352787/how-to-set-per-app-sound-outputs-in-windows-10/

You can choose the device that Wallpaper Engine outputs to there, look for wallpaper32.exe/wallpaper64.exe and pick the device that is supposed to upmix the sound.

[Spaceowl]

Wallpaper Engine uses the default audio device.
The default audio device (creative card) is configured to upmix stereo 2.0 sound to all channels, to 7.1
But 5.1 or 7.1 sound is directly audibled to the speakers.

I always tought that scene wallpapers are stereo sound and was confused why it was not umpixed to 7.1. But I madae a mistake in my post above! Today listened closely to all speakers and scene wallpapers make sound on the side speakers, so 5.1 sound, while the rear speakers stay silent.
Now I understand that the audio driver don't mix up the wallpaper engine 5.1 scene sound, because it umpixes only stwereo sources.

Whell, so to have not 5.1 but 7.1 sound, I need a way to force wallpaper engine to use 2.0 stereo sound! (so that the sound driver would umpix it to 7.1)

Is there a way to force WE use stereo sound output?

[Biohazard]

That make sense. But I'm afraid the library we are using to play sounds (SFML which in turn uses OpenAL soft) does not allow us to choose this as far as I can see. It must be detecting that the device supports 5.1 and then pick that, while it apparently doesn't support 7.1 itself. Although from what I can google it seems they support 7.1, but I cannot test this on my end.

SFML has no updates available but we could see if OpenAL can be updated and maybe they resolved the issue since it seems to be odd that either OpenAL or SFML would pick 5.1 output if there is 7.1 output available.

[butcho]

Sounds like this is maybe something related only to your soundcard? In my case I send the WPE audio via SPDIF to my external receiver and it applies a mode called "Extended Stereo" to output the sound on all my speakers, doesn't matter if front, side, rear or center. On all speakers it sounds the same.

So I guess the sound output in WPE is like it should be but my Creative soundcard days are over since Soundblaster 16, so I don't know. Just saying... ^^

[Spaceowl]

I have found another solution. First I installed "Voice Meter Banana", which created a virtual sound device.Then I confiogured wallpaper engine to nut use default audio device, but the new virtuall device.
In Voice Meter Banana I configured the virtuall device to upmix to all speakers, then to assigned the output from this virtual device to the default physical audio device. And thaht works! :)