PulseAudio + Intel HD Audio + Debian = works
Pipewire + Arch Linux + Intel HD Audio = works
Pipewire + Debian + Intel HD Audio = Doesn’t work
Debian bug report:
Debian 12 in VirtualBox with Intel HD Audio, PipeWire, and 4 GB RAM causes videos to fail loading
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Can reproduce using a Debian 13 XFCE VM (not Whonix), using pipewire and pipewire-pulse inside VirtualBox with the audio device set to Intel HD Audio. Ubuntu 24.04 is using Pipewire by default so I wonder if this can be reproduced there. (The AC97 fix worked here as well, and in fact VirtualBox has AC97 as the default audio device for Debian VMs so I didn’t initially notice the problem.)
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It is reproducible on ubuntu. its debian based/upstream design issue.
Yep, just confirmed that it happens on Ubuntu too. (Sometimes Ubuntu’s packages are different than Debian’s so it was worth a shot.) So I guess time to see what Arch is doing differently since @Patrick couldn’t reproduce it there.
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So, odd thing, When Pipewire is the only audio server that runs in a session, audio is broken as has been seen. However, you can actually get Pipewire working using the following weird trick:
- Start audio in Tor Browser, wait for it to hang
- Pause the audio
sudo apt install pulseaudiosystemctl --user disable pipewire-pulse.socketsystemctl --user disable pipewire-pulsesystemctl --user disable pipewire.socketsystemctl --user disable pipewiresystemctl --user stop pipewire-pulsesystemctl --user stop pipewiresystemctl --user start pulseaudio- Start audio, hear it play
- Stop audio again
systemctl --user disable pulseaudio.socketsystemctl --user disable pulseaudiosystemctl --user stop pulseaudiosystemctl --user start pipewiresystemctl --user start pipewire-pulse- Start audio, it will actually play through Pipewire now!
If you install qpwgraph, you can see that Pipewire is indeed being used for audio now. I haven’t tested it for an extended period of time but it seems to be stable at least to begin with.
Perhaps Pipewire is doing something related to initialization wrong? It seems like Pulseaudio is able to initialize the audio somehow and then things work with Pipewire thereafter.
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That is really weird indeed.
Minor: It was @nurmagoz who reported that.
It looks like this is a known problem upstream and may be fixable with a configuration setting. See No Sound in VMware Fusion or VirtualBox VM's with Fedora 34 Gnome/KDE (#1301) · Issues · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab, going to test now. EDIT: tried adjusting some of the settings mentioned there, issue did not resolve.
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