PulseAudio not supported, buggy with ALSA+PulseAudio => Fixed in 1.5.4

[SerajewelKS]

PulseAudio is not supported natively, and using the ALSA PulseAudio driver and using ALSA from VirtualBox results in very erratic behavior, including crashes in programs running in the guest and failure of the guest tools to start.

This could be fixed by either adding native PulseAudio support or by using libao for the audio component, allowing any interface supported by libao to work.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

I have never heard of PulseAudio, but you can't expect us to support every audio extension/subsystem present in Linux.

[Adam Goode]

PulseAudio is the new default in Fedora 8. ​http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio

If you (understandably) don't want to spend time to support PulseAudio, is it possible to at least allow the Alsa driver to choose the hardware device? PulseAudio can define an Alsa device, but it seems like VirtualBox won't be able to select it. ​http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#ALSAApplications

[Sean]

This is still broken on VirtualBox 1.5.0.

PulseAudio is pretty important. It will be the default sound environment in just about every Linux distribution within 6-12 months, most likely. Fedora 8 already makes it the default. The PulseAudio website explains in more detail why there is a need for a new userspace sound daemon (summary: we need it, audio experience in UNIX is crappy without it).

Using OSS with 1.5.0 causes a crash (it would be using ALSA's OSS emulation which goes through the PulseAudio plugin), and using ALSA allows sound to play for about 1 second before it cuts out and never works again until the guest is restarted.

[Frank Mehnert]

We are aware of that problem. However, instead of writing a complete new audio backend we would prefer some kind of ALSA emulation if this is possible. Or perhaps is there some ALSA-to-PulseAudio-HOWTO?

[Frank Mehnert]

PulseAudio backend in SVN, will be contained in 1.5.4 as well.