USB microphone on Ubuntu host, xp guest 2x speed and garbled

[BrianP]

Hi,
There are dozens of posts on this topic, but no solutions so far other than a few reports that some have it working. How?

I have a Plantronics CS50 USB headset. It works fine on the host, Ubuntu 9.04 / 64 bit using Gnome Sound Recorder 2.26. The voice sounds clear and natural. When I reboot to xp/native, it works flawlessly. When I run xp pro sp3 in VB and record with Nero Ultra 7, the playback sounds like double speed. And, even in the middle of words, the Nero Wave Editor shows drops to zero amplitude every fraction of an inch or so followed by a normal wave form for the next fraction. It sounds like every other syllable is being dropped.

I tried to train Dragon Naturally Speaking, and it proved to be impossible so it seems to follow the VM and not the application. The training went seamlessly on xp/native.

In VB, I have tried both OSS audio driver and ALSA. Same result on both. Recording is fine on the host with the Gnome Sound Recorder when sound capture is set to cs50 alsa with the sound preferences dialog. I can record an OGG file and it sounds fine.

I am seeing the exact same symptoms reported by pjssilva » 28. Jun 2009, 19:16, "
Re: Microphone in Windows XP Guest does not work". It was never replied to. On an Ubuntu forum, somebody reporting switching to a "low latency kernel" to fix the problem. Is there some system setting or process priority setting to fix this?

I have tried every audio setting in VB with the same garbled results. Could somebody with a similar, working USB microphone detail their setup?

Thank you,

Brian

[hank_se]

I suppose you have usb working in your host without mods as it should do in Ubuntu 9.04, if not forget my suggestions!
Some devices don't seem to work well sharing the same device node beetwen host and guest, an easy solution to test if this is the case for you is to add the file /etc/udev/rules.d/11-vboxdrv.rules with the following content:

KERNEL=="vboxdrv", NAME="vboxdrv", OWNER="root", GROUP="root", MODE="0600"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", GROUP="vboxusers", MODE="0664"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", NAME="VirtualBox/$env{BUSNUM}/$env{DEVNUM}", GROUP="vboxusers", MODE="0664"

This file will override the file 10-vboxdrv.rules installed by VirtualBox and create unique device nodes for vboxdrv under /dev/VirtualBox leaving the nodes under /dev/bus/usb untouched for the host. You might try to add it reboot and see. If it doesn't help or worsens your problem you only need to delete it reboot and you'll be back with you'r old problems!

[BrianP]

Hank,
No difference. The sound is still 50% missing and played back at double speed. I can not even decipher my own voice so Dragon has no chance whatsoever. Checking some of the Linux groups, there are dozens if not hundreds of similar reports of usb misbehavior related to VB going back 3 years. There are vague reports of somebody who heard of somebody who had gotten around the problem, but zero detailed fixes.

I reported it as a bug <http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4617>. I am going to have to dictate into my xp (native) laptop even though it is barely faster than typing or move my database and web servers to xp and boot this workstation to windoz. Egad!

Thanks for trying...

BrianP

[the_mccloud]

I just want to "confirm" this using a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 (USB device). "Confirm" in the sense that audio/mic capture from the webcam doesn't work at all. Video capture from the webcam works fine.

looks like similar/same setup:
Jaunty 64-bit
Windows XP Pro SP3 guest
guest additions installed
Virtualbox 3.0.2
Pulse Audio (ALSA doesn't work, either)

I'm mostly trying to use Rosetta Stone in this guest, but using the Logitech webcam software to record a video just locks up when it says it can't detect any sound from the device. Using the generic sound recorder in the Windows guest (which should be capturing from my webcam mic) locks up the entire computer....NOT just the VM.