So I was trying to set up the alsamixer settings for my SB Live! 5.1 sound card that I’ve had forever – since at least 2003. I always have a hard time getting the settings right to enable 5.1 for Dolby streams as well as excellent sounding music mixing, and I always end up fscking something up. I sat down and did some Googling, and stumbled across this excellent wiki:  Emu10k1 – ALSA wiki

You can also use the graphical tool gnome-alsamixer -zp 20031103 or you could try “qamix” from: http://www.suse.de/~mana/kalsatools.html which has a nice preset for the emu10k1, use “qamix -g emu10k1.xml” if you run it from the source dir after you have compiled it. 

So now it is pathetically easy. qamix can be installed via apt, and the emu10k1.xml is available from the given website. Poof, the SB Live 5.1 is set up with optimal values and is ready to go.

How could I live without Google?