virtualbox.org

Hi.

I'm using Mac 10.4 and I'm running Windows XP as the guest on the virtual box.

The audio is very scratchy, glitchy, and it stutters.
I've installed guest additions and I've tried downloading other sound drivers.
I've also tried every combination of the sound options in the virtualbox settings.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

I too have your same problem, and I have not found solution.
I'm thinking of abandoning the idea of virtualbox in the mac osx.
Hopefully someone will enlighten
Stexus

It is common on my iMac (late 2007 aluminum) to experience audio problems with Ubuntu. The speed is slow. Sometimes fine, most of the time not. When using VB in Windows 7 RC in my BootCamp partition, I almost never have issues. Some are saying the problem is VB for Mac OS. I am not sure, but it is very frustrating.

This problem has been reported before as Slow sound on Linux guests using VB 3.0.6 on Snow Leopard. I've tried the two suggested fixes on a late 2008 Aluminum 13.3 inch Macbook, Mac OS X 10.5.7 running VirtualBox-3.1.4.

Using the Audio Midi Setup app wasn't a permanent fix for me. It turns out the Format frame rate gets changes during VirtualBox VM boot up (at least under kunbutu 9.10). The way I found to get it to boot up correctly was to switch from the 82801AA-ICH driver to the pulse audio driver and back then do a powerdown and reboot. I had trouble using the pulse audio driver, I'm not sure I trust the system administration => multimedia system tool in KDE.

Once I got KPackageKit to install everything with pulseaudio in the name that didn't conflict and didn't have ocaml in the name it worked on reboot. I noticed after a reboot that system administration -> Multimedia showed a mix and match for driver selection against various sound sources. I booted a couple of times to see if it was stable and noticed that KDE would take longer to come up because the preferred audio driver pulseaudio didn't work for everything. It might be worth a little hard coding to make things go faster. (I'm a save and restore state sort myself). A few more boots and I got too slow playback under pulse audio, too. Also get popcorn noise. Altogether it sounds like inconsistent configuration load. I'll give a try at switching back to the 82801AA-ICH driver driver and maybe try an init script fix like the good old days. The boot time is a pain.

I wouldna' poked this wasps nest at all, but I was composing an email comparing the draw backs using VirtualBox vs. Parallels 5.0 vs. VMWare Fusion 3 when I saw the thread. Sure there's bugs. I still prefer it. There're bugs in all of them - you get to chose the features you like the best. When you can have a Mac desktop in another 'Space' or VLC, QuickTime, iDVD Player or iTunes in the dock, you'd think you were after particular software working to be concerned with this one. Mind you if you paid money for the guest OS you wouldn't be getting your money's worth, but hey I'm running the OSE. Still seeing improvements over time, and it doesn't require paying for an upgrade.

I don't know if it will help everyone but, I added this sound.conf file into /etc/modprobe.d of several Linux guests of various distributions and it cured my slow sound issues. hope it helps.

options snd-intel8x0 ac97_clock=48000
options snd slots=snd-intel8x0
# CvwD.FAMlirE10w6:82801AA AC'97 Audio Controller
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0