audio sound on macOS changes when VM is created

[robbkidd]

With macOS and VirtualBox, Audio quality changes in bluetooth headsets for the worse when Test-Kitchen (via kitchen-vagrant) starts up test VMs.

Current workaround: set your default sound input device to something other than your bluetooth headphones.

---

Reported by Omry in #test-kitchen room in the Chef Community Slack on Nov 20:

every time I create virtualbox vm through kitchen it hooks up with my microphone and change the audio volume, and instead of listening to music I listen to myself typing. anyone knows how to prevent that from happening? (this is on a mac laptop)

The problem was dismissed by Omry at the time as probably not reproducible.

I think this is specific to Boss QC-35 drivers.

Omry's Environment

macos 10.14.1 virtualbox 5.2.20 Vagrant 2.2.0

Chef Development Kit Version: 3.3.23
chef-client version: 14.5.33
delivery version: master (6862f27aba89109a9630f0b6c6798efec56b4efe)
berks version: 7.0.6
kitchen version: 1.23.2
inspec version: 2.2.112

---

I've just started experiencing this today after setting up a macOS Mojave laptop with VirtualBox 5.2.22 (& 5.2.20).

The audio change seems to be triggered by starting up a VM in VirtualBox and your macOS default sound input device is your bluetooth headphones. VirtualBox starts the VM with audio enabled and engages the host OS's audio somehow to trigger the microphone to be used. Sound quality changes because the bluetooth device shifts to bidirectional mode for sound in and out.

Robb's Environment

macos 10.14.1 virtualbox 5.2.20 & 5.2.22 Vagrant 2.2.1

Chef Workstation: 0.2.35
chef-run: 0.2.2
chef-client: 14.7.17
delivery-cli: master (6862f27aba89109a9630f0b6c6798efec56b4efe)
berks: 7.0.6
test-kitchen: 1.23.2
inspec: 3.0.52

[tas50]

I've actually been running into this lately and it drives me NUTS. I'm curious what we could do to resolve it.

[robbkidd]

One possibility might be adding this to our Vagrantfile template.

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
  v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--audio", "none"]
end

[robbkidd]

Dunno if it's related, but VirtualBox 5.2.20 and 5.2.22 both seem to have a chew-up-CPU-when-waking-from-sleep issue (1 & 2) that's been correlated to audio being enabled for a VM.

[bdausses]

I'm hitting this too... running Bose QC-35II's.

[bdausses]

Pinged @tas50 on this and he still hadn't found a fix. I went off based on @robbkidd 's note above and found that if I add this to my .kitchen.yml, it seems to prevent this issue:

  - name: centos-7
    driver:
      customize:
        audio: none

[robbkidd]

@bdausses Hey! That totally generates the right customize modifyvm line through the template. I'm looking to see if we can make audio: none a default.

[bdausses]

Awesome. I tried to get it inserted into the template, but didn't have much luck. Would love to see this integrated into TK as its almost never that we actually need audio. Looking forward to this being the default!