great success with Dragon Naturally Speaking on WXP Guest!

[mrodent]

Dear all,

Ubuntu 10.10, 4 GB RAM of which 1 GB RAM devoted to the WXP virtual machine.

I am a huge newbie and not a techie at all, but I have stumbled on a solution to running DNS on a WXP guest with super high quality sound... easily enough to dictate. Maybe the things I have to say here are obvious and known to the entire community. Equally I am aware everyone's situation is different due to the differing hardware. But for some this information might be pretty valuable. Personally I have been delaying switching fully over to Ubuntu because of this very problem.
Incidentally I have a "Buddy 5G" USB mike. The crucial lesson I have learnt is that you DO NOT get the guest to recognise the mike as a USB device. Doing so actually appears to snatch the USB device away from the host's system.

The combination which finally worked for me was this: use the USB mike for the sound input for the Ubuntu host:
- with the guest unlaunched, check VB settings for the WXP VM (virtual machine)
make sure that under Audio you have the ALSA audio driver
make sure that under USB there is NOT a filter for the USB mike
- go Sys --> Prefs --> Sound --> Hardware
there should be 2 devices if the USB mike is properly connected and working: the USB mike and the Internal Audio.
set USB mike to Analog Mono Input and Internal Audio to Analog Stereo output
- tab: Input:
Input volume turned up as high as it can be (and mute unticked!)
choose a device for sound input: the radio button must be set for the USB mike
it should now be possible to see the sound level indicator responding on this tab as you speak into the mike
- tab: Applications
there are (at the mo) 2 "plug-ins" for VB: turn up the volume as high as poss (mute unticked) for both
- Start up the WXP virtual machine
make sure the USB mike's box under Devices is UNTICKED
at this point you should be able to record with high quality using the USB mike, and also dictate.

The point is that although the Guest machine can't see the USB, the "standard input" coming from the Host is in fact the USB because this is how you have configured the sound in the host. Also, very important: if you do load the USB mike in the WXP guest, the USB, it appears, is removed from the host's system! This means that your sound settings in the host become cancelled and there is no input coming from the host at all! The only way the guest can then get sound input is through the microphone jack or the computer's internal mike, neither of which are going to produce the quality of sound you need for DNS.

[Sasquatch]

So you're saying that the separate microphone gives better quality than the sound card of the Host when used in the same way? That's interesting, yet also worth investigating. This would mean that cheap sound cards, like all those onboard 'HD audio' things are really worthless (which they already are). Would it make a difference if you would have, let's say, a Creative Audigy or X-Fi sound card and a decent quality microphone compared to the onboard junk? How would it compare to the USB mic?

In addition, when you let the USB get grabbed by the VM, you have to change the input source inside Windows to be from the USB device instead of the virtualised sound card. Can you test the quality of that? If that is of similar quality, then one would need a quality sound card on the Host for quality input inside the Guest.

[mrodent]

Hi,
First, let me say, if you are one of the "minds" behind VB, thank you & thank you Sun!... This ability to use the microphone and Dragon NS is not trivial for me: I use Dragon in my work all the time and, as I say, this is the one thing really which has prevented me from moving over to Linux. Also VB is helping ease the transition in other ways (e.g. I am still using my MS Access dbase in the VM but planning to move to MySQL which I will obviously be able to operate in the Ubuntu OS). So this is a huge breakthrough for me. I now boot up to the Ubuntu partition by default and have hopefully left Windoze where IMO it belongs - the past.

So you're saying that the separate microphone gives better quality than the sound card of the Host when used in the same way? That's interesting, yet also worth investigating. This would mean that cheap sound cards, like all those onboard 'HD audio' things are really worthless (which they already are). Would it make a difference if you would have, let's say, a Creative Audigy or X-Fi sound card and a decent quality microphone compared to the onboard junk? How would it compare to the USB mic?

I don't really know about the cheapness of the sound card. My machine is a Dell E6410, recently purchased, with no particular emphasis on gaming or media or whatever. In the course of my experimentation I did have occasion to use the in-built microphone: records fine in the Ubuntu Host (Sound Recorder) but with room-echo, necessarily. Using this method inside the VM was not practical: too "scratchy". Quality has to be superb for dictation. Similarly, my USB mike divides into 3 segments: the two segments preceding the final USB bit which plugs into the USB socket actually have standard audio jacks... so I did try plugging these in (i.e. just the mike segment's audio jack, then the mike segment + middle section's ("booster?") audio jack)... both of these produced sound which was far too scratchy, again, to work for DNS in the VM. I don't know about the ins and outs, altho I remember reading that someone once said the trouble with audio jacks is that the signal from the mike is degraded by some sort of interference with the various electrical fields inside the computer.

In addition, when you let the USB get grabbed by the VM, you have to change the input source inside Windows to be from the USB device instead of the virtualised sound card. Can you test the quality of that? If that is of similar quality, then one would need a quality sound card on the Host for quality input inside the Guest.

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly: it is essential NOT to let the VM grab the USB! The USB mike has to be set up, as per my recipe, so that it is the Host's sound system. Under no circs must the USB mike be ticked in the VM's USB device list!

[Sasquatch]

I've searched a bit for the laptop specifications, and it's very vague about the media thing. That only happens when the sound card itself is low quality junk (like a Realtek HD audio or similar). It gives sound, but that's it. It does not provide any options to increase the quality in any way. That's why audio input on the Host sounds fine, but is terrible on a VM.

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly: it is essential NOT to let the VM grab the USB! The USB mike has to be set up, as per my recipe, so that it is the Host's sound system. Under no circs must the USB mike be ticked in the VM's USB device list!

And that's what I want to figure out, WHY is this needed. What is the difference between the Host based input compared to the direct input through USB capture?

I'm not involved in the product in any way, I'm just a user like yourself. I just like to do something in return for this wonderful program.

[mrodent]

WHY is this needed.

Sadly way beyond my ability even to speculate. Yes I'd assume my sound card is some junk. Just one thing though: I do remember at one point during my experimentation phase, trying to use input through USB, with the mike ticked as a USB in the Guest (i.e. the arrangement I later rejected) ... I do remember the sound seemed garbled rather than scratchy. It was as though something was being fed back to an input when it shouldn't be.

The inherent quality may have been comparable to normal USB input (i.e. not particularly scratchy).

[tshann]

Alsa plug-in VirtualboxVM weird input.png (99.19 KiB) Viewed 1500 times

I got this to work for years. Now, however It won't work at all. I tried to set up my linux mint 18.3 host with my win xp guest as he said. Used to work w/o any issues. Now however, it doesn't work at all. A clue is attached. It shows that for some reason, when Xp guest boots, and I go to the "recording" tab on pavucontrol, I get more than a dozen entry for virtualbox alsa plug-ins. Same if I plug in different usb mics. Also, when capturing the USB mic, windows sees it, and can sort of record with it, but it's not useable in quality. Using the method this gentleman recommends no longer works. I even tried to go back to one of the older Virtualbox formats when it did work, using the same virtualmachine of XP - again, no help.

The thing is, virtualbox dictation via dragon in this little guest VM used to be about the same as running it on Xp or any windows box. Now, it's a bust and I am scratching my head how to even troubleshoot it. When I try to record audio on the linux side w/o virtualbox running - just recording into audacity - works fine and no redundant alsa plugins. So seems to be something specific to Virtualbox. The behavior (shown in the picture) is the same whether I'm using virtualbox 5.2 or 6.1.

Any ideas how to solve/troubleshoot/fix?

[tshann]

Well, have found a great solution; dispense with Alsa and use PulseAudio. Now that I'm using pulseaudio, my dragon dictation is back! I also found that the dragon was slow (to a deal-breaker degree) after I got pulse audio to work for sound. So I ended up creating a new Dragon profile, and wham, now dictation is essentially indistinguishable from native. In addition, the memory and CPU footprint of either Dragon 12 premium is VERY reasonable. Once you put the same app in Virtual Win7 x64, it uses up quite a bit more resources.
So using pulseaudio as the sound source in the virtualbox settings instead of ALSA sorted the mic being ported into the VM cleanly. Creating a new profile, then cleaned up Dragon so it's responsive and works near-native. Excellent!

Mostly popping this in for others in similar circumstances or even for myself years from now if I run into troubles. Running Mint Xfce 18.3, with latest Virtual box 6.2, and win xp svc pack 3, Dragon 12 premium. This combo works a treat!

Peace