Allow audio buffer size to be adjusted

[dpward]

I am using VirtualBox 1.3.8 with Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) as host and Windows XP SP2 as guest. When I attempt to play music (or run any application producing continuous sound) in the Windows XP guest, the sound plays continuously as long as I only interact with the Windows guest. Whenever I interact with the Ubuntu host (even simply maximizing/minimizing a browser window), the sound coming from the guest will skip.

It seems that the sound only skips when the host takes any CPU time away from the guest, which would make sense. While searching for more information about this problem, I found that VMware allows you to modify the size of the audio buffer for its virtual sound card (see ​http://www.vmware.com/support/ws3/doc/ws32_vidsound4.html). I believe that having the ability to adjust the audio buffer size in VirtualBox could effectively minimize this problem, since the guest could potentially go much longer without CPU time before the audio buffer would empty.

Ticket #167 may also be caused by this problem, although the situation described there is not completely the same.

[Sven]

+1