Crackling Unusable Audio in Virtual Windows 10

[IanFluidd]

Hi everyone, first time posting here.

I'm running windows 10 on a virtual machine from my windows 11 laptop (Ryzen 9, 8 cores/16 threads, 16 GB RAM, NVME SSD, laptop RTX 3070). Of these I've allocated 8-10 GB of Ram and 8 cores.

In the past I've had no issues, but recently (I may have made some windows/driver updates to my laptop) when I try playing any sound through the virtual machine it crackles and is 'staticy' so badly so as to be unuseable. I deleted everything and set up a new virtual installation on the latest version of VB, but I'm having the same issue. In control panel > sound I've made sure it's set to stereo, and I've updated to the lates windows updates, but nothing changes it. Has anyone else experienced this?

I've attached my VM log to this post, hopefully it is of assistance.

I'd appreciate any help with this issue

Windows-2022-11-19-22-47-24.zip

(45.07 KiB) Downloaded 11 times

[mpack]

Reduce VM cores to 2. Enable 3D acceleration.

For details of why this works, search the forums for "crackles audio".

[IanFluidd]

Reduce VM cores to 2. Enable 3D acceleration.

I have spent a fair amount of time searching these forums and had come across the 'use 2 cores' solution but after testing it had no effect. I didn't ever notice that I should enable '3d acceleration', but after doing so this resolved my issues.

Thank you so much for the help!

[mpack]

Actually, neither of those changes is a magic fix when applied indiscriminately. The trick is to correct the unbalanced allocation of CPU resources that created the overhead that causes the crackly audio. You had assigned 100% of available CPU cores to the VM, leaving nothing for host code (which includes VirtualBox itself): correcting that was priority #1. Enabling 3D acceleration relieves the VM of the further overhead of simulating a graphics processor, which also frees up CPU for the audio emulation. Another thing you can sometimes do is switch the guest to stereo audio instead of allowing 5.1 or 7.1. Again, this relieves the CPU of the need to simulate the additional 3 or 5 audio channels.