5.1 USB audio

I have an acer revo 3600 which I've been using for the past 9 years with mythfrontend (on gentoo). It uses the nvidia Ion chipset, is fairly low power and is good enough to play anything I have. I have a USB sound card which shows up under lsusb as: ID 0d8c:0006 C-Media Electronics, Inc. Storm HP-USB500 5.1 Headset

I fancied a change after all this time and wanted youtube, so I put kodi on it with Ubuntu. This turned out to be a little flaky, so I thought I'd try libreelec which so far has been excellent but with one caveat. Audio.

With myth I used alsa, but had to re-map the speakers to get the correct output to the correct speakers. Ubuntu uses pulse, so I mapped the speakers with that. In both myth and ubuntu/kodi I could get audio in any format decoded and sent to the correct speakers.

Now with libreelec I can only get stereo audio from youtube and mpgts recordings, AC3 etc produce no sound at all, and even if they did I suspect it'd come from the wrong places. I notice the root fs is squashfs and hence read only. Is there any way for me to use my old .asoundrc (or even a new configuration) successfully with alsa and get everything working as it should?

This is the working (but not on libreelec) .asoundrc :

pcm.usb {
    type hw
    card 0
    device 0
}



pcm.swapped {
type plug
slave {
#       pcm "surround71"
        pcm "surround51"
        channels 6
        }
ttable {
        0.0 1
        1.1 1
        4.3 1
        3.4 1
        2.5 1
        5.2 1
        }
}

pcm.dup {
type route
slave.pcm "cards.pcm.default"
slave.channels 6
ttable.0.0 1
ttable.1.1 1
ttable.0.3 1
ttable.1.2 1
ttable.0.5 0.5
ttable.0.4 0.5
}

#pcm.!default pcm.usb

#pcm.!surround71 pcm.swapped

and the modification to pulse's default.pa:

load-module module-remap-sink sink_name=fix-surround master=0 channels=8 master_channel_map=front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center,lfe,side-left,side-right channel_map=front-left,front-right,lfe,front-center,rear-right,rear-left,side-left,side-right
set-default-sink fix-surround

Kodi is very nice and I really don't want to feel I have to go back to mythfrontend to get both decent sound and a stable system.

Cheers I'll try that

No dice, still stereo or nothing.

I did a minimal image ubuntu install and now running kodi as a service with no WM. Solid so far and with the added bonus of proper sound again. If I used SP/DIF or only had stereo audio then LE would be for me, but sadly it's not.