Audio through spice

[Victor Toso]

Hi Dorothy,

On Sat, Apr 27, 2024 at 12:57:49PM GMT, Dorothy Calhoon wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I use spice to redirect the usb ports from my POPos host to my
> Mac Catalina operating system in my QEMU virtual machine which
> was set up using quickemu and now is accessed via quickgui.
> Spice works fine for redirecting the keyboard, mouse, wifi and
> printer. Now I need it for audio.

SPICE supports playback and record audio channels. Playback is
audio coming from the Guest to your Client and Record is client's
microphone to redirect to the guest.

If you already uses usbredir channel, chances are that your spice
client already supports playback/record too. Which spice client
are you using?

> I know that audio has been a problem in virtual machines with
> Mac operating systems later than Catalina, but it is supposed
> to work in Catalina. 

If you are using spice-gtk, the audio backend should be gstreamer
and the right plugins need to be installed

> I have a small speaker that plugs into the guest via a usb port
> but it is not recognized. I also tried headphones in the audio
> out ports and still Preferences show nothing for sound and
> there is none.
> 
> I understand that spice can allow the audio sound card from the
> host to pass through to the guest. How do I implement that
> feature? Somewhere I read that inputting the following into the
> host terminal would do it: QEMU_AUDIO_DRV= spice. However,
> terminal did nothing and just wanted more instructions. The
> directions I had found said that after this command you could
> then use -soundhw hda options. However, terminal does not
> recognize soundhw and I wasn’t sure exactly what the “options"
> were.
> 
> I also tried -audiodev spice,id=id[,prop[=value][,….]] and the
> terminal said that the audiodev command was not found.

I'm not familiar with quickemu nor quickgui, but again, if you
are already using some spice channels, I'd guess the problem is
on the client-side.
 
> It appears that there are just a couple of commands that would
> allow the audio passthrough feature of spice to work, but I
> don’t know exactly what they are. I am new to using terminal so
> I need very precise instructions. I would appreciate your help
> in this. 
> 
> Thanking you in advance.
> 
> Dorothy

Cheers,
Victor
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