3.7. Audio settings

The "Audio" section in a virtual machine's Settings window determines whether the VM will see a sound card connected, and whether the audio output should be heard on the host system.

If audio is enabled for a guest, you can choose between the emulation of an Intel AC'97 controller, an Intel HD Audio controller[16] or a SoundBlaster 16 card. In any case, you can select what audio driver VirtualBox will use on the host.

On a Linux host, depending on your host configuration, you can also select between the OSS, ALSA or the PulseAudio subsystem. On newer Linux distributions (Fedora 8 and above, Ubuntu 8.04 and above), the PulseAudio subsystem should be preferred.



[16] Intel HD Audio support was added with VirtualBox 4.0 because Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit versions) as well as 64-bit Windows Vista do not support the Intel AC'97 controller.