Cracking sound from Virtualbox after the Pipewire update

Hello all,

I have been having some issues with the audio on my virtualbox VM running the latest Windows 10 and the latest Vbox drivers.

Using the pulseaudio driver before the pipewire update everything was fine, after the update the sound is cracking every 2 seconds and there is a very big audio delay.

Using the ALSA driver mitigates the cracking issue to some extend but not fully.

Im using kernel 5.10.34-1-MANJARO.

Any ideas welcome.

I have exactly the same problem. My VMs are all Linux (Manjaro, MX-Linux).

1 Like

What happens if you downgrade the packages below to the previous version?:

pipewire
pipewire-media-session
gst-plugin-pipewire

Hello, try to set the VM to ALSA and INTEL-HD-Audio under Audio-Settings.

As I mention in the original post, unfortunately this doesn’t really work. And even if it did, it causes even more problems since with ALSA the VM doesn’t detect my mic.

Im already using the Intel-HD-Audio for all the tests.

$ pipewire --version
pipewire
Compiled with libpipewire 0.3.26
Linked with libpipewire 0.3.26

So I downgraded to 0.3.25 using:

$ sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/pipewire-1\:0.3.25-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst 
[sudo] password for delta: 
loading packages...
warning: downgrading package pipewire (1:0.3.26-1 => 1:0.3.25-1)
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (1) pipewire-1:0.3.25-1

Total Installed Size:   5.88 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:      -0.49 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] Y
(1/1) checking keys in keyring                                                                                     [#####################################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking package integrity                                                                                   [#####################################################################] 100%
(1/1) loading package files                                                                                        [#####################################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking for file conflicts                                                                                  [#####################################################################] 100%
(1/1) checking available disk space                                                                                [#####################################################################] 100%
:: Processing package changes...
(1/1) downgrading pipewire                                                                                         [#####################################################################] 100%
:: Running post-transaction hooks...
(1/1) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...

The other packages were not installed, problem still is the same.

Well, in my case I had issues with version 0.3.26 that I was able to work around by downgrading all the packages above to 0.3.25. Every case is different I guess.

Version 0.3.27 just made it to the unstable branch, maybe you just need to wait for that update to be available to see if that fixes your issue.

It’s also a good idea to check out upstream to see if anybody else has reported similar issues there.

Thanks for the info, guess I will have to wait.

Could I maybe then remove pipewire and use the only working pulseaudio until this is resolved or with every update it will install pipewire again?

I think pipewire is not optional. I might be wrong though.

Would there be any problems If I just disable it from systemctl?

Apparently, somebody did that on Kubuntu and Fedora and worked

El_Brujo, Mine is Fedora 34 upgraded recently from 33. And I noticed this problem immediately after upgrade. Are many different reports abaout problems with pipewire, since audio crackles, cable/wifi/bluetooth network connections. Detail: My audio is Realtek, I don’t now if this help.

I’m not an expert in the area, but basically yes, it looks like Pipewire is not mature enough that it causes many issues, mostly audio-related. (I had issues with video involving pipewire though).

Not sure about Fedora but this topic is widely discussed within the Manjaro community.

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