Hi.

I am trying to send out four channels of audio from a patch using the on board audio hardware of my motherboard, which supposedly supports up to eight channels. I am currently running speakers out of the rear green and blue(doubles as a rear speaker out) jacks on my mobo, and this setup works when tested by the realtek audio driver.

However in pd I cannot hear anything if I connect sound to the 3rd and 4th inlets of a [dac~ 1 2 3 4]. I have set the number of channels to 4 in audio settings. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Is this even a viable setup?

Pd uses portaudio to talk to your drivers, and I seem to remember a while ago reading that portaudio works best if you have the number of input and output channels the same, even if you don't have that many channels. So maybe try that?

Are you on winxp? I had the same problem which I couldn't resolve. Everything started to work since I switched to pd-vanilla, both multi channel output and low latency performance. Take a look and scroll down to the bottom of this thread;

http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-6732-hold-function

hope that helps.