No audio on guest OR HOST for ubuntu on Windows 7

[ericgyeh]

Starting a guest Ubuntu machine (10.04 or 11.04) on Windows 7 not only has no audio, but also kills the audio on the host until the guest is closed.

-- I've looked at all the other tickets and there is not one that is quite relevant.

-- I have tested on a Windows XP host as well, where the bug does not exist. My friend has also tested on a variety of linux machines.

-- (This will likely sound super nontechnical but I'll include it anyway in case my playing around helps you guys debug!) I have inadvertently (but rarely) encountered situations where I AM able to get sound on the host or even both machines (VERY rare), so it does not seem to be as simple as a driver or configuration problem. This seeming "miracle" occurs when I am shutting down one guest machine and starting up another. To the best of my empirical judgment, it seems like (1) there are three relevant events during the guest startup process: (a) something where audio is "turned off" on the host, (b) soon thereafter guest audio is linked to the host audio, and (c) the startup completes and I get the login screen, which seems to "commit" the change from (a); furthermore (2) sometime maybe ten or fifteen seconds after the guest machine is powered off, an event occurs that "turns on" audio on the host again. So now imagine there is an event (2) occurring from a previous machine turning off, during the timeline of a new startup (1). Under usual timing, (2) occurs too early or late relative to the new startup (that is, before (a) or after (c)). in those cases, there is no audio on either machine. But if (2) occurs between (b) and (c) (I can time this maybe 25% of the time with practice), I get audio on my host. If (2) occurs between (a) and (b) (this has happened twice out of more than hundred attempts), I get audio on both my host and my guest.

[ericgyeh]

A recent log file

[ericgyeh]

A recent log file (where the audio worked for the host machine but not the guest)

[ericgyeh]

A recent log file (where the audio did not work for either host or guest)

[ericgyeh]

A recent log file (where the audio did not work for either host or guest)

[J-Luc Barraud]

I use Ubuntu as a guest in Windows 7 64 host, I don't have this problem, it works perfectly on the 2 machines (guest & host).

[ericgyeh]

Congrats, glad it works for you! The problem seems to be localized to 32 bit Win 7.

I've seen many other threads on this now (not sure how I missed them before), eg ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=14155

Not sure why virtualbox doesn't seem to care to fix it, since it seems pretty widespread. I gave up months ago and switched to VMWare Player, which works fine.

Best, Eric

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.