Audio no longer emits sound starting with Vbox 5.0.X

[re_nelson]

Hardware Platform: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8Z77-V LX (Quad-Core Hyper-Threaded Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K @ 3.50GHz) Host Soundcard: HDA Intel PCH, Chip: Realtek ALC887-VD

Host OS: Fedora release 22 (Twenty Two) 4.1.7-200.fc22.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Sep 14 20:19:24 UTC 2015 Host Audio Driver: PulseAudio

Guest OS: Oracle Solaris 11.3 X86 SunOS ducky4 5.11 11.3 i86pc i386 i86pc Guest Audio Controller: ICH AC97

Guest Audio Info (booted into Solaris 11.3): Name = audio810#0, Config = Intel AC'97 (ICH), HW Info = AC'97 codec: SigmaTel STAC9700

See this URL for a full description of the problem (replicable 100%): ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=73856

In short, starting with the 5.0.X series, audio stopped emitting sound on non-Linux guest systems including Solaris11, Solaris10, FreeBSD-10.2 and PC-BSD-10.2. All Linux guests continue to emit audio across the 4 and 5 Vbox versions. The setting of the Guest Audio Controller is of no consequence. Audio is heard regardless on Linux guest systems but not on Solaris and *BSD guests.

Rolling back from any of the 5 Vbox versions to any of the 4 versions resolves the problem with no other changes to either the host or guest systems. It also is not confined to Fedora 22 as a host since the behaviour is the same on Gentoo 2.2, Linux Mint 17.2 and my own homegrown LFS host.

[re_nelson]

VirtualBox 4.3.30 - sound works

[re_nelson]

VirtualBox 5.0.6 - sound is NOT emitted

[Frank Mehnert]

There is the following known problem with VBox 5.0.x: If you try to play an 48KHz sound after login, nothing is audible. The workaround is to play a system startup shound (which usually comes with 44.1KHz). After this, it's also possible to play 48KHz sounds.

[re_nelson]

frank:

Is there a Bug Ticket number for the 48 KHz sampling rate that you mentioned?

For what it's worth, all of my audio files on the Solaris 11.3 guest system are already PCM at 44.1 and do not produce audio on any of the 5.0.X Vbox series. Reverting to 4.3.X resolves the problem on my various Linux hosts.

[re_nelson]

Windows 10 host, Solaris 10-1/13 guest, no sound heard

[re_nelson]

On rare occasions, I boot into Windows on the ASUS P8Z77-V LX computer mentioned in the initial defect report. I can confirm that Solaris 10-1/13 does NOT emit sound on that system (Windows 10 Pro) using ICH AC97 as the guest controller and Windows DirectSound for the host driver. The Windows mixer does show the Solaris guest and the level slider was set to 100%. Likewise, there are no errors reported during playback on the Solaris guest. See the attached log.

As is also the the case with Linux hosts, various Linux guests DO produce audio on that Windows 10 system.

Thus, on my hardware, the problem of no audio is not peculiar to only Linux hosts.

I did not try a rollback to Vbox 4.3.X due to lack of time. The testing was confined to using Vbox 5.0.6.

[re_nelson]

I briefly booted into my "bare metal" Oracle Solaris 11.3 system on the same hardware as described in the initial report of 2 weeks ago to perform some sundry tasks. While there I launched the recently-released 5.0.8 VBox version out of curiosity.

The behavior was the same. ONLY Linux guests on this Solaris host produced audio. Ironically, a Solaris 11.3 as a guest did NOT produce audio. The guest indicated no errors and the progress meter of the sound player marched along properly for the duration of the audio clip. On the Solaris guest, the mixer applet was present and behaved without astonishment.

In short, all phases of audio SEEMED to be working from the vantage point of the guest. The only flaw is that no sound is actually produced.

Without any changes whatsoever in the Solaris guest, I reverted back from 5.0.8 to 4.3.32 and sound was produced as expected.

Ironic in that an Oracle OS guest won't yield sound in an Oracle OS host! :)

I still contend this bug is minor since Solaris, though an otherwise fine platform, isn't renown for its multimedia aspects.

I haven't bothered with trying to hack the VBox code but I suspect this change in the 5.0.X series may be the culprit: "New, modular audio architecture for providing a better abstraction of the host audio backends."

[Frank Mehnert]

The 48 kHz problem I mentioned in comment is fixed in the most recent 5.0.x test builds.

[aomelche]

I have the same problem with VirtualBox Version 5.0.8 r103449 Host OS: Windows 8.1 Guest OS: Linux Mint 17.2

[Frank Mehnert]

The fix is part of VBox 5.0.10. Please reopen if still relevant with VBox 5.0.10.