Grab bag: Missing surround sound, a lost Mac, and more
As you can imagine, I get questions. Lots of questions. And many times the answers to those questions are shorter than the queries themselves, making them poor fodder for a readership that feels cheated by anything less that bushel-loads of consonants and vowels by the peck. And so I horde these questions and, once enough have accumulated, drop them with a thump. Like so:
iTunes and 5.1 sound
I have a Mac mini plugged into an AV receiver via an HDMI cable. Some of the movies I have in my iTunes library are encoded to play 5.1 audio, but the sound always seems to come out in stereo. Is there any way to make it default to surround sound?
You’ve been spoiled. And by that I mean that you’re accustomed to media players (DVD players, for instance) that have such a cordial relationship with an AV receiver that the two agree upon the correct audio configuration and do their respective jobs. And those jobs result in surround sound if the media was encoded that way, and stereo or mono if that’s the correct audio format for that particular bit of media.
iTunes is less smart about this kind of thing. More often than not iTunes will default to playing audio in stereo rather than surround sound even when it’s jacked into a 5.1 receiver via an HDMI or Toslink cable. You can instruct it to play the surround (or Dolby) version by choosing Controls > Audio & Subtitles > English (Surround). Alternatively, as the video is playing, move the cursor to expose the play controls, click on the sound bubble, and choose the surround setting from the resulting menu. But I agree it would be far sweeter if iTunes recognized a hunk of media with a surround track and played it by default.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2040046/grab-bag-missing-surround-sound-a-lost-mac-and-more.html#tk.rss_all
