If you are lucky enough to have ALSA sound working in guest on 1.3.4 without
host reboots, you can access sound in the guest and the host concurrently. If
you start a second guest, with ALSA sound, there is a complaint about no access
to the sound device, but sound works normally in the second guest.
Regards,
-Michael
Frank Mehnert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi Andrin & Zisch,
On Sunday 11 February 2007, Zisch wrote:
> 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!? ;-)
The manual was wrong. The next release (expected in some hours) will contain
ALSA support. ALSA will probably reduce the latency somewhat. Note that ALSA
support is still kind of experimental.
> 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.)
The libasound >= 1.0.11 contains a software mixer -- therefore the ALSA
backend should solve your problems.
> (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. ;-)
Please not that we have limited human ressources. That is donation of code
is welcome. ;)
> 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.)
The USB support has still some limits. Most USB2 hardware we tested are
hard disks.
> 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)!
Thank you very much for that compliment. Experiences with the new ALSA
backend are appreciated.
Kind regards,
Frank
--
## InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH, http://www.innotek.de ##
_______________________________________________
vbox-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
---------------------------------
Bored stiff? Loosen up...
Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo! Games.
_______________________________________________
vbox-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
