Play Audio from AppVm on device attached to USB Cube

[Torsten Grote]

Hi all,

I am a new Qubes user and amazed by the awesome work you put into Qubes
to make compartmentalization usable. Also great to see how much you care
about the community. Feels already good to be a part of it.

Now to my question: I am running a USB Qube that has all my USB
controllers attached. There is an external sound device attached and I
managed to make it show up in Pulseaudio and play audio from the USB qube.

However, the pulseaudio daemon running on the USB Qube is of course
isolated from the rest of the system, so if I want play sound in a
disposable VM (e.g. from Youtube) for example, it doesn't play. I guess
this is because Pulseaudio in dom0 doesn't know about this output device.

Is there any way (maybe with an additional vchan sink) to make this
output device available globally so it can play sound from ideally all
AppVMs?


I've read https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/external-audio but this requires
assigning an entire USB controller to a different VM and I think it also
assumes that only this VM will play the audio, right?

Kind Regards,
Torsten

[Connor Page]

Read the last part at https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/usb/
This should solve your problem unless you want to mix sound from multiple vms.

[Torsten Grote]

On 07/30/2016 08:51 PM, Connor Page wrote:
> Read the last part at https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/usb/
> This should solve your problem unless you want to mix sound from multiple vms.

Yes, like I wrote, I ideally want to mix sounds from multiple VMs. So I
would prefer to find a solution for that.

However, as a temporary solution I would be fine to use my output device
only from one VM. The problem with that is that the output device is
connected via Bluetooth and I don't really like to expose that to other
domains. But even then, the Bluetooth adapter (which is part of the WiFi
card) fails to properly attach to different VMs and when trying that the
USB cube does no longer routes mouse input from the USB mouse to dom0
until I restart it.

So if somebody has an idea for how to expose an external audio device to
pulsaudio globally, I would appreciate some hints.

Thanks,
Torsten