Can't have surround output in FMOD Studio on Linux

[gahel]

Hi,

I’ve been working with a surround sound system and can’t output more than stereo with FMOD Studio on Ubuntu 24.04.
I set the the platform as surround in the build tab of the preferences window and I can see the surround panner. However I can see that fmod only has two output ports with both pulseaudio and ALSA.

Am I missing something?

[Connor_FMOD]

Hi,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. What version of FMOD Studio are you using?

[gahel]

Hi,
I’ve been testing with both 2.02.21 and 2.02.23 with no success

[Connor_FMOD]

Unfortunately, I was not able to reproduce the issue.

Am I able to get a screenshot of the available outputs for both PulseAudio and ALSA?

[gahel]

Hi again, sorry for the long delay I didn’t have the setup for a while.

It is working indeed, I was not understanding how to do it.
For anyone that encounters the same issue, FMOD uses pulseaudio configuration and my sound cards don’t have a surround configuration. It would probably work by making one but I went for a different solution.

1. Install pactl if you don’t have it already.
2. Create a virtual surround sink: pactl load-module module-null-sink object.linger=1 media.class=Audio/Sink sink_name=virtual-surround-sink node.description='Virtual\ Surround' channel_map=front-left,front-right,front-center,lfe,side-left,side-right,rear-left,rear-right

You should see it in the sound settings of your system like so:

3. connect the outputs to your soundcard, for example with Helvum
   

   

4. In FMOD project’s settings, use the corresponding channel map
   

   

5. Set the surround speaker mode to 7.1 in the project platform
   

   

This solution does not persist after reboot, but you can easily launch a script to create the virtual sink on startup. You can automatically connect the outputs to your soundcard with pw-link if you’re using pipewire.

[Connor_FMOD]

Thank you for sharing such a detailed solution!