VirtualBox

Opened 14 years ago

Last modified 11 years ago

#6049 new enhancement

JACK audio support for Virtualbox (Linux host)

Reported by: mark_orion Owned by:
Component: audio Version: VirtualBox 3.1.2
Keywords: jack Cc:
Guest type: other Host type: Linux

Description

It is difficult to use audio from one or more Virtualbox VMs and other applications simultaniously. Or to route the audio stream between VMs and applications. Virtualbox currently supports OSS, ALSA and pulseaudio. While the pulseaudio implementation on many distros (Ubuntu) is buggy and difficult to configure, OSS and ALSA usually do not support multiple applications using the audio device at the same time. I suggest additional support for JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit). JACK is a well established soundsystem that many (semi)professional audio users use.

Change History (5)

in reply to:  description comment:1 by zob, 14 years ago

Replying to mark_orion:

It is difficult to use audio from one or more Virtualbox VMs and other applications simultaniously. Or to route the audio stream between VMs and applications. Virtualbox currently supports OSS, ALSA and pulseaudio. While the pulseaudio implementation on many distros (Ubuntu) is buggy and difficult to configure, OSS and ALSA usually do not support multiple applications using the audio device at the same time. I suggest additional support for JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit). JACK is a well established soundsystem that many (semi)professional audio users use.

I would love to se jack support for virtualbox. I route all my sound thru jack and virtualbox is one of the few places I don't have sound. Or rather, I can make sound, but it's not recognizable as sound - more like noise. That is because jack makes xruns when trying to route sound from virtualbox thru it. I just get loads of this: 23:13:40.340 XRUN callback (3 skipped). subgraph starting at qjackctl timed out (subgraph_wait_fd=9, status = 0, state = Running, pollret = 0 revents = 0x0) alsa_pcm: xrun of at least 416.193 msecs

comment:2 by Christian Pötzsch, 14 years ago

As you noticed yourself, we are supporting 3 sound backends on Linux. In comparison to other platforms this is far the most. As I fully understand your reasons on using Jack, we have to decide what are basic and what are advanced use cases and how we have to use our limited man power for. In short, we are highly interested in contributions from your side ;).

comment:3 by zob, 14 years ago

Is it possible then to work towards making direct-usb-sound work inside the guest, like it does in vmware? That would mean that people who use jack on their linux host could draw sound directly from the guest via a usb-headset or usb sound card.

Obviously not only people who use jack will benifit from this. Also people who have usb sound cards (or similar) that won't work under linux, could install them in their virtualbox (running a guest OS that supports their card).

It is possible. It actually works in wmware, but in my setup wmware is terribly slow compared to virtualbox, which I would actually prefer had it not been for this need of mine.

I can help testing, but I don't have skills for much more.

comment:4 by Dominique, 14 years ago

I don-t want to buy one more usb apparatus because I already have too much usb stuffs.

A more general solution would be to support jack. I don't have the skill to help you with that, but jack support will be a really great improvement for the following reasons:

Jack is the only professional sound server on linux, the preferred one on mac, and it work very well on windows.

Jack is very simple to setup for the casual user.

Pulseaudio is just to complicated to setup for the casual user when it doesn't work well out of the box. Just for that, I will never understand why so many linux distributions are shifting to using it as default sound server. Their time would have been much better spend with improving alsa and jack.

Alsa just doesn't work with virtualbox on 64 bits.

comment:5 by rogerx, 11 years ago

Only "OSS ICH A97" driver/controller works here within 64bit, although hasn't worked for many years.

"ALSA ICH A97" is choppy or poor quality for 64bit platforms, although people with patience to deal with Pulse Audio, does it maybe work.

"ALSA IntelHD" and "OSS Intel HD" both never worked for me.

"Soundblaster 16" is the only working driver for x86/32bit platforms.

Shrugs, would really be nice to just use Jack Audio. ;-)

Version 0, edited 11 years ago by rogerx (next)
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