Comment 3 for bug 390318

Host: Ubuntu 9.04 64 bit, 8Gbytes RAM, Intel Q6600 CPU (4 cores) @ 2.88GHz
VirtualBox 3.0.4 from its own repositories.
Guest: Windows Server 2003 with XP look and feel
Virtual sound card: ICH AC97
Guest Additions are installed.

Both sound and microphone is working fine in the host OS. Both ALSA and Pulseaudio are working fine.

With VirtualBox and the above guest ALSA gives me only garbled sound and a completely noisy, totally unusable microphone. Using Pulseaudio results in almost perfect sound, but the microphone is still unusable, cropped and almost as noisy as with ALSA.

I don't know what can be the problem in this case. Maybe the guest and the host do not agree in the size of sound samples (8 or 16 bit, mono or stereo) and the virtual DMA is set up the wrong way, I'm not sure. But it seems to be clearly a data format negotiation issue.

I haven't tried the virtual Sound Blaster 16 yet...