Better sound on VirtualBox under Ubuntu

For quite a while I have been having a recurring problem with sound on a Windows guest OS under Virtualbox. After a while it will just hang up and when I restart the Virtualbox session under Ubuntu I will get an error message saying that the host’s sound system isn’t working. Since I don’t use Virtualbox that often I forget about it and moved on.

I know it has something to do with the Pulseaudio system on my Ubuntu set up but was a bit lazy to google for a solution. Anyway my sound was quite fine under Ubuntu so I didn’t mind it at all.

Then a couple of days back, I found this very useful tip from my email on how to remove the Pulseaudio drivers and replace it with esound. I decided to try the procedure. After removing/disabling the pulseaudio drivers and installing the esound system I never experienced the problem with Virtualbox again.

So if you’re having the same problem with Virtualbox, here’s how I remove pulseaudio and install esound on my Ubuntu Intrepid:

sudo -s

apt-get remove pulseaudio

apt-get install esound

rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio

Go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions

Deselected or Remove the Pulseaudio Manager

cd ~

cp .asound* yourfilename

rm .asound*

You can read the full procedure from the ubuntugeek web site from here. Removing pulseaudio and replacing it with esound really did the job.

Virtualbox 2.2.0 is now available from the Virtualbox web site but I still haven’t tried it yet but esound should still work even with the updated Virtualbox version.

Cheers.