Sound becomes choppy within minutes, stays like that

[Virtual Bart]

Hi there. I've been happily using VirtualBox for a few years now in order to run some older programs in older Windows editions. Worked fine so far, other than some hitch here or there, but nothing that couldn't be solved by googling... until now. I've made it a habit to always keep the program updated to the second to latest version. That way, if the new version screws something up, I will probably have the fix available in the latest version by the time I install the second to latest. That is to say, the first time I came across this issue was in version 5.2.6. Still, updating to 5.2.8 didn't help.

Here's the thing: The sound works fine up to a certain point. Let's say I play a song or video, or start a program: it sounds normal, as it always has. But within a few minutes, the sound starts becoming garbled, to the point that it quickly becomes very noticeable and annoying. Nothing helps other than closing the program/player and starting it again. Then it sounds normal, but without fail, it becomes choppy again after a few minutes. This never happened before 5.2.6, and it happens for all my guests (mainly Windows XP or 7). Since XP and 7 use different sound controllers (AC97 for XP, Intel HD for 7), and since all of those guests worked flawlessly until now, I assume the audio controller is probably not the issue. It feels more as if it was some kind of RAM problem, but again, I never encountered this so far and nothing changed on my host. Did something change on 5.2.6 that may be causing this?

I tried uninstalling and going back to 5.2.4 and even 5.2.2, but the issue persisted. Then again, both those older version were showing the new interface, so maybe I didn't uninstall properly. Anyway, I'm stumped, anybody got any ideas I could try? I'm not exactly a computer whiz, but I'm willing to read and happy to provide any additional info you may need.

[Virtual Bart]

Are you all as stumped as I am? I'd pretty much take anything at this point: a nudge in the right direction (or in any direction), some thread I could follow... I'd even settle for some help on how to do a clean uninstall so I can properly try an older version.

[socratis]

Audio is an area that they're actively working on. Your best bet at this point is to keep on trying the latest test builds...

[UliBär]

At the moment sound is fubar, but i still hope, time will finally fix it sometime...

[Virtual Bart]

Well, looks like that was the nudge I needed, thanks, fellows. I did try the latest test build, which seems to behave the exact same way for me, so I decided to try even older versions. I was a bit more thorough with the uninstalling this time, deleting some leftover folders and whatnot, but oddly enough, even 5.2.0 still boasted the new interface... and had the audio issue. So did 5.1.34, although this one did show the "right" interface. Finally, as for some other users commenting in some bugs' discussions (seems like my search engine of choice is not particularly good at finding those ), 5.1.30 did it for me. So I guess I'll gladly stick to that for the time being, until the good people working on the issue manage to un-fubar it.

I wonder, though (no real need to enlighten me now that I seem to have reached a solution, but feel free to try and do so for the sake of discussion), how is it that I only encountered this issue in 5.2.6 while some others seem to have been struggling with it for months. Also, how is it that both the issue and the new interface seem to have been retroactively adopted into all of the old 5.2 builds... or maybe I just suck at uninstalling things, Ockham's Razor and yadda yadda.

[Geoff_the_chef]

I had this issue on a clients machine running Ubuntu 16.04. After upgrading them to VirtualBox 5.2.2 there was a problem running training videos in an AVI format, though sound otherwise from the guest OS itself was unaffected? The videos played but with the choppy sound described. I tried the different audio driver options without success. Uninstall 5.2.2 and re-installed to 5.1.28 and problem solved.