USB audio is garbled

[esj]

I am encountering significant distortion in USB audio both input and output. for USB audio device, I used the VXI B200 microphone and headset.

Fixing this problem is important because it gets in the way of disabled users using a virtual machine for their speech recognition environment. Using speech recognition in a Windows guest virtual machine solves many problems including stability, performance, and multimachine accessibility.

[esj]

audio file demonstrating distortion

[Joseph Reagle]

Yes, VirtualBox has never done USB mics well unless you build a custom kernel. With the 2.* VBoxen and 2.6.* kernels I have to use the following options CONFIG_PREEMPT=y CONFIG_HZ_1000=y CONFIG_HZ=1000 # CONFIG_NO_HZ is not set. Of course, the shared clipboard eventually breaks, which is supposedly fixed in VBox 3.0B1, but it breaks the sound again, even with a custom kernel.

[rfkrocktk]

I'm also experiencing this problem. How do I modify my kernel options to get this to work? Do I need to be running an RT kernel?

[Joseph Reagle]

I'm now running Linux urd 2.6.31-9-rt which came with Kubuntu Karmic (9.10) and it works well.

[Ravenman]

I have virtualbox_bin 3.1.2 installed on Arch Linux system (kernel 2.6.32.2 (x86_64) + KDE 4.3.4) and I have this issue also with a MS-Windows Xp as guest.