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VLC Alsa Surround Sound 5.1

The recent versions of VLC require some extra setup for alsa 5.1 surround sound. By default vlc chooses the alsa device 'default'. When you're trying to switch the audio mode to "Surround 5.1", you got the error message

VLC Audio output failed: The audio device "surround51" is already in use

This can be solved by running vlc from terminal like this

vlc --aout alsa --alsa-audio-device surround51

Surround51 is the alsa device you want to play audio with. You can get the list of available alsa audio devices by typing aplay -L in the terminal

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