virtualbox.org

Hello,

I've read through the FAQ & Manual, but didn't find anything useful on this...

In Windows, if you have multiple sound cards, you can set a piece of software to always use a certain card (if the software supports that kind of selection).

So...if I have multiple instances of a cloned Vbox running on that same system, is it possible to set each Vbox to use a particular sound card?

I'm asking this from the perspective of streaming audio, where multiple instances of WME could be used, rather than just one. In our situation, there are a number of supplemental management & monitoring programs running alongside WME, but they make it difficult - if not impossible, to run multiple instances on one pc. Yet doing so is a tremendous waste of hardware, because Task Manager reports barely 5% CPU usage while WME is encoding. If I could fill the PCI slots with cheap sound cards and assign a Vbox to each card, it would save a lot of wasted space, hardware, and money.

Thanks.

PCI devices percee are not supported, just about everything is emulated and most only once.

You can force VirtualBox to use a different card than the host (change default sound card manually before & after startup, see linked post), but I'd guess that you'd be stuck using the same one for all virtual machines. Too bad as this seems like a simple feature to implement.

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 432#p27432

You may have better luck with a product such as "Virtual Audio Cable", something apparently of value to others in your situation.

http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html

Ehm, if it's about encoding stuff using the audio card, why not set the audio output to null? That way, all encoding tasks are done on the Guest, each with it's own audio card, but the Host won't play it if that's how they work.