Fedora 11 Createve Soundblaster Live 5.1 and distorted or no sound

After upgrading to Fedora 11 sound was not usable. The setup of the computer contains the building Intel HD sound and a Creative Soundblaster Live! 5.1 soundcard. Headphones with a microfone are attached to the onboard Intel HD card. A 5.1 speaker system is connected to the Create card. I use the headphones for VOIP and the Creative card for video and audio playback.

When I watch a video with the sound played via the Soundblaster card, the sound was scrambled, crackling and there was a massive hiss. Additionaly the kernel printed

ALSA sound/core/pcm_lib.c:166: BUG: stream = 0, pos = 0x2000, buffer size = 0x2000, period size = 0x2000

during playback. Playback via the onboard Intel sound was ok, even the kernel continues to spew out this error message. So i continued to research the issue. I was confident, that the error is not a critical kernel bug, but more of a configuration issue. The first step to resolve the bug was to switch pulseaudio to use "Analog 5.1 Output" for the soundblaster card. This configuration is in the  'Sound & Video' -> 'Pulseaudio Volume Control' program. Switch to the 'Configuration' tab and choose the 5.1 profile from the combo box. Look at this screenshot to see which profile i used. After changing it, the hissing stoped, but i couldn't here anything. In a terminal window I started `alsamixer -c 1', where '-c 1' means that it configures the second soundcard in my system (soundcards are counted starting with 0, as are most things in the IT world). Far on the right side there is an entry called "SB Live" which was unmuted. After muting it, as you can see in the screenshot,the sound worked.

So the steps to solve the problem for me were:

• Correctly configure pulseaudio to use the analog 5.1 output
• Use alsamixer to mute the SB Live Analog/Digital Output Jack.