VirtualBox and Sound

[figueroa]

For many months I've had trouble playing sound in an installed 64 bit MX-18.3 virtual machine running in a 64 bit Gentoo host with VirtualBox 5.2.32 (stable). The, over time, I noticed that my one Windows XP virtual machine also started without sound.

I found working solutions here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1 ... albox.html, which points to a VirtualBox foum solution here: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/18342

The runtime patch (on the host machine) works for both Windows and MX-Linux guests. In turns out the buffer value is somewhat sensitive. I've had good luck running the patch from the host machine commandline before launching the guest, as well as while the guest is running. On my machine, the recommended value of 100 works fine for Windows, but I found that 200 works better for MX. Easy peasy. Nice to have sound back.

Code: Select all

VBoxManage setextradata global VBoxInternal2/Audio/ALSAAudio/BufferSizeMs "100"

The command runs fine in an MX Linux host as well, but I don't know if it's needed in that use case.

This trick does not work, however, on the MX-19-December snapshot running on the same host. Using sox to play a wav or ogg file just locks up the terminal. MX-19 loads vboxguest 6.0.12, but I don't know if that's the reason for the difficulty in 19.

Finally, the "trick" doesn't seem to always work. Unstable like a house of cards.

[dolphin_oracle]

I usually fix sound problems in VB by changing what sound card is emulated. Its been a long while since I had any issues though.