Arch Linux

Slabity

Member

Registered: 2013-12-29

Posts: 40

[SOLVED] Getting virt-manager and virt-viewer to use ALSA

I'm running a few VMs using libvirt. However when access the VMs in either virt-manager or virt-viewer, no sound is present. All the VMs are using SPICE, and all the qemu processes appear to be run using QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=spice as they should (I'd prefer to avoid using QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=alsa if possible). Audio works perfectly fine if I install and run PulseAudio, but I'd like to avoid using PA as well.

Even without PA installed, both virt-manager and virt-viewer try to use it for some reason:

$ sudo virt-viewer Windows
...
(virt-viewer:15686): GSpice-WARNING **: PulseAudio context failed Connection refused
(virt-viewer:15686): GSpice-WARNING **: pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused
...

Is there any way to tell virt-manager and virt-viewer to use ALSA? Or even (doubtful) JACK?

EDIT: Ugh, of course I figure this out minutes after I post this...

The underlying software for both virt-manager and virt-viewer is the spice-gtk3 package. The spice-gtk software doesn't support using ALSA directly, and needs to use either PulseAudio or GStreamer. For some reason the default arch package compiles the software for PA instead of gstreamer. A simple fix is to change the PKGBUILD to use '--with-audio=gstreamer' instead.

Last edited by Slabity (2015-07-31 08:53:24)