Hi, I have more or less the same problem with sound on a Linux host. (The guest is Windows XP, but that shouldn't matter here.)
1. The manual says that one can choose between ALSA and OSS (and the dummmy-soundcard) for sound on Linux hosts. However, in my installation ALSA does never show up in the choices - I can only choose between the dummy-soundcard and OSS, in the GUI as well as using the command line tools. (And yes, my host runs a 2.6.19 kernel with 100% ALSA. No OSS whatsoever on this machine, except for the ALSA-OSS-emulation. And the sound works flawlessly in any other Linux application.) Is there something wrong with my installation or host system? Or is the manual wrong and ALSA is not (yet) supperted? (If so, _when_ will it be supported!? ;-) Using OSS, the sound is OK, but - as one would expect with OSS - as long as a VBox instance is running, no other of my applications on the host can use the soundcard. (I didn't test multiple VBox instances running in parallel yet, but I guess, the first one started will grab the soundcard and others won't have any sound just like "native" host applications.) Since I would like to use a VBox instance with Windows XP for Skype, running constantly in the background, this is not really an acceptable solution for me. (I'm not willing to do completely without sound on my host machine, which is my main workstation, also used for watching movies, online radio and so on.) (BTW: I didn't register any latency problems as Andrin, but then, I didn't really listen for that. In any case half a second would probably be acceptable for me with Skype, but anyway OSS still sucks and is mostly obsolete for quite a long time now. ;-) 2. I tried the same "solution" like Andrin, namely organizing an USB soundcard (Creative USB SoundBlaster Audigy2NX) and "forwarding" that to the guest. I had to fight a bit with the Creative drivers on the guest system until I got the card to actually work, but then I ran into the same problem like Andrin (and got stuck there): The sound is incredibly choppy with echoes and distortions (completely unusable). It gets tiny little bit better if I reduce the sound quality lowest possible level (something like 16 bit and around 27 kHz, as far as I can remember), but it's still not usable, and Creatives driver control sadly doesn't let me go below that (though I probably could do with much less quality for VoiceIP). So I came to the same conclusion like Andrin: though the virtual USB interface is supposed to be USB2 it doesn't really deliver that bandwith. (Probably not even near to USB2, at least on my Athlon 64X2 4400+ host machine. After all, I tried to play simple stereo sound in the lowest quality setting. As I understand, with the full USB2 bandwidth, I should be able to output 7.1 channel sound at the highest quality and record some external stereo source at the same time.) Well, naturally I have the same questions like Andrin: Is it possible to get ALSA instead of OSS and/or fix the USB problem somehow? Or will at least one of these issues be adressed in a future VirtualBox release, if possible rather sooner than later? Help would be very much appreciated! I would love to run Skype in a virtual machine - it's the only reason I still got a Windows machine constantly running along my actual Linux workstation/server. I already dream of the day when I can turn off that Windows computer and use the machine for something more interesting! (I know, there is a Skype version for Linux, but I never got it really running. The last version I tried at least used - finally! - ALSA instead of OSS and it worked "somewhat", but during longer calls a lot of problems showed up like steadily decreasing sound quality up to loosing the sound completely and/or Skype hanging itself up. It's a shame, that Skype obviously still isn't able to provide a Linux version which actually works for plain simple phonecalls.) That said, I would like to support Andrins statement: VirtualBox is simply amazing, and seems to work extremely well all in all. Thanks a lot to the VirtualBox developers for writing such a great application and provide it to the community (in big parts even as OSS)! Best regards, Zisch _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
