Audio through spice

[John Paul Morrison]

Hi Dorothy

This sounds more like a guest problem - you could probably find more help
on the quickemu Discord or looking through github issues/discussions.

It's been a while but changes to Opencore or qemu settings can break audio
and other things.
Spice probably isn't redirecting your usb keyboard/mouse - normally it just
sends the input to the emulated guest hardware.
It also does this for audio.

I have had OSX Catalina with working sound, and it breaks with
Opencore/boot or other changes to the virtual hardware.
Qemu/quickemu and Opencore have to map the intel-hda guest machine "sound
card" into something Catalina can use.

I have used USB redirection with Catalina - but you need to make sure
Catalina has drivers/kexts for the USB hardware.
Just getting USB working in Catalina was a challenge before - maybe that's
been fixed. These were virtual machine/guest settings for
usb-ochi/ehci/xhci.



On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 3:09 AM Victor Toso <victortoso at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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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