No Audio in Android-x86

Question

I've setup an Android-x86 image (4.0-RC1-eeepc) in VirtualBox on a Dell Latitude D820. This particular ISO is not for the laptop, but of all available ISOs it works the best.

I have worked through some of the troubles I have come across (by not having an ISO for my device), but I haven't been able to get the sound working. The Android-x86 VirtualBox tutorial and other online resources directed me to use the ALSA driver with SoundBlaster 16, but this has not worked.

This question got me to look at some of the ALSA commands to see what I could find, but I'm not getting anywhere with it.

With the ALSA driver and SoundBlaster controller I get the following from alsa_ctl init

Unknown hardware: "Dummy" "Dummy Mixer"
Hardware is initialized using a guess method

This looked very wrong to me so switched to the Intel HD Audio as the other question did.

With the ALSA driver and Intel HD Audio controller I get the following from alsa_ctl init

Unknown hardware: "HDA-Intel" "SigmaTel ID 7680" ...
Hardware is initialized using a guess method

While this looks a little more promising, I still have no audio.

Since Android is basically Linux, I thought I would be able to translate a Linux solution. Several webpages have content similar to this one saying to modify /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add options snd-hda-intel model=CORRECT_MODEL and this appears to help a lot of Linux users. However, this doesn't seem applicable to Android. At least not to me, since I don't have alsa-base.conf

I know so very little about audio and ALSA. Is there anyting jumping out from what I have above? Even a nudge in a general direction would be great.

Some questions that I have: What does it mean when I get the Unknown hardware: "Dummy" info? No audio device?

Lastly, I have verified that my sound works outside of virtual box. My first throught is that since my laptop can run Linux with sound, I should be able to include the Linux drivers in Android. Does that make any sense? Unfortunately, I also don't really know how to go about doing that either.

Thank you

Answer 1

I had the same issues.

I was using VMWare for WhatsApp. And had various Android versions without audio... Setup VMWare with HDAudio config file mod.

alsa_ctl init

Always showed no devices.

I installed this App from Google Play "AlsaMixer (ROOT)" And this versions got audio instantly:

• android-x86-4.3-20130725.iso
• android-x86-4.4-RC1.iso

Answer 2

I had the same issue.

I kept looking for init.sh and then realized I had to install the darn thing to disk before that was worth fiddling with (it's re-parsed on reboot and the live disc doesn't save).

So I snagged the latest x86 ports and flipped through them till I found a 4.2x without issues. Sadly I lost track of which is which, and the good one is simply vm.iso?!

Long story short, audio is working fine with this build, I didn't even need to tweak anything.

System:

• Motherboard Tab:
  • 4GB RAM (Half the Host RAM)
  • [x] Hard Disk (Only boot device)
  • everything else is default
• Processor Tab:
  • 2 cores
  • everything else is default
• Audio:
  • Windows DirectSound
  • ICH AC97
  • everything else is default

Answer 3

Had a similar no audio problem in vbox. In your init.sh add this line to the end of the alsa_amixer stuff:

alsa_amixer set PCM 100 unmute

After I aded that my audio worked fine.