Can't stop machine from stealing microphone

[schwim]

Hello there!

Host: Win 10.0.19041
VB: 6.1.14 r140239
Guest: Debian 10

In spite of unchecking "Enable audio input" on the machine I'm running, Windows shows in the taskbar that Virtualbox has control of the microphone and when I go to the Windows settings, it lets me know that VB is one of the apps that I can't disable the use of the microphone.

Is there a way for me to force Virtualbox to not be able to take control of the mic? I'll never need it in the guest and currently, I have to shut down the guest machine to be able to do my meetings.

Thanks for your time!

[fth0]

Is there a way for me to force Virtualbox to not be able to take control of the mic?

This is a known problem, but there is a workaround:

When the VM is running, click the audio icon in the status bar of the VM window, enable audio input, then disable it again (kudos to arQon ).

If you don't need audio output from the VM, you could also disable audio completely in the VM settings.

[arQon]

/me feels honored

You reminding me of that made me wonder if there was a better way, because in practice I just don't have the patience to have to deal with that bug every time I restart a VM. So I dug around a bit in the obvious place, and found it: "VboxManage controlvm <vm> audioin <on|off>".

It has the same bug as the runtime GUI: that is, it needs to be enabled first so that it can be disabled afterwards, but it's workable. So, you spawn the VM, then toggle the setting twice. (With the obvious optimisation of actually setting it ON by default and then only having to worry about turning it off in the launching script, but I think that's misleading enough that I'd rather have the correct setting visible in the VBManager GUI, especially since the bug will get fixed someday).

Not especially practical if you have a LOT of VMs or you use the Manager to launch them, but otherwise seems to work nicely so far.

[schwim]

Thank you so much, that indeed got me over the bug!