NForce 3 Audio and Windows Vista - Please Help

[fearking]

Hello everyone! I have a problem with my NForce 3 motherboard. I freshly installed Windows Vista and realized that I have only stereo sound, but not 5.1. Winamp, Media Player...etc does not play 5.1 either. I've tried a lot of Realtek drivers, because my sound chipset is ALC658. After I uptaded my sound drivers, windows has detected that I have 5.1 sound, I've selected it, but still no 5.1 sound in games/music/films. The only application that can use 5.1 sound is Foobar2000, but only with a channel mixer plugin, which I cannot find for Winamp/Media Player either. If anyone have any solution or something, it would be really nice. Thank you in advance.

Best Regards,
fearking.

[Seawolf]

The changes in Windows audio stack are a bit complicated, and applications won't really understand that, often enough. Notably, by default apps can only process as many channels as they have, but MS has a Speaker Fill enhancement that can be enabled (depending on your drivers) in the sound property pages.

DirectSound3D has also been deprecated (removed,) so some games just aren't going to go multichannel.

This shouldn't affect all your applications, but if they aren't Vista aware, it still might.