OSS sound and VBox
Posted: 22. Jun 2009, 20:22
Sound in the virtual machine pretty much sucks. I read several blogs, forum threads, and support posts regarding sound on Linux, and was convinced that removing PulseAudio and Alsa in favor of OSS was the way to go. Of course, OSS3 is deprecated, and there is little support at Ubuntu for the newer OSS4.
After much trial and error, I have OSS working on the host machine. However, VBox can't find it. OSS is available from the host audio driver selection box, so I click it. When the guest machine starts up, a popup window tells me that VBox failed to find any audio system, and that null audio driver has automatically been selected.
I will note that on the host system, selecting OSS fails - I must instead select the ESD sound daemon. That daemon apparently finds and initializes the OSS sound system, because everything works fine. Within VBox, there is no choice for ESD, OSS fails, and of course, NULL doesn't do anything except make the guest THINK that it has speakers to play to.
At this point, I don't know if I'm looking at an Ubuntu problem, a VBox problem, or a user problem. It's quite possible that somewhere among all the how-to windows, I've simply overlooked something obvious.
Any help would be appreciated.
BTW - sound on the host is improved tremendously as a result of installing OSS4. Anyone interested in doing so might look at this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSound Aside from an improved sound quality, I can now run multiple instances of multiple applications that can access the sound system simultaneously.
After much trial and error, I have OSS working on the host machine. However, VBox can't find it. OSS is available from the host audio driver selection box, so I click it. When the guest machine starts up, a popup window tells me that VBox failed to find any audio system, and that null audio driver has automatically been selected.
I will note that on the host system, selecting OSS fails - I must instead select the ESD sound daemon. That daemon apparently finds and initializes the OSS sound system, because everything works fine. Within VBox, there is no choice for ESD, OSS fails, and of course, NULL doesn't do anything except make the guest THINK that it has speakers to play to.
At this point, I don't know if I'm looking at an Ubuntu problem, a VBox problem, or a user problem. It's quite possible that somewhere among all the how-to windows, I've simply overlooked something obvious.
Any help would be appreciated.
BTW - sound on the host is improved tremendously as a result of installing OSS4. Anyone interested in doing so might look at this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSound Aside from an improved sound quality, I can now run multiple instances of multiple applications that can access the sound system simultaneously.