Running mAirList as inside a Virtual Machine with soundcard support

English Hardware
1

Hi,

We are currently looking at implementing mAirList on a Virtual Machine running a Windows desktop sitting inside a HyperVisor in our server room/master control room.

Previously we have looked at this opinion but always run into issues with the HyperVisor host passing through any kind of USB soundcard through to the Virtual Machine. ie if we plug in a USB soundcard into the HyperVisor host, we aren’t able to see the soundcard within the Virtual Machine even though we have USB passthrough enabled. It seems passthrough is mainly used for external storage devices, not soundcards.

I’m not sure if anyone else has attempted this and had any success?
The only other way I can think of doing this is outputting the audio as a network stream but it’s not quite as neat as a soundcard solution.

2

You can either pass the USB device into the VM, or use the virtual audio device of the hypervisor, and have the hypervisor route it to the physical sound card.

Hard to say which (if any) will work best, as it depends on so many things (hardware, type of hypervisor, type of sound card, etc.).

I haven’t been too successful when I last tried :frowning:

3

Thanks for your reply Torben.

We’ve had a similar lack of success in our previous experiments with our old VMware ESXi licence.
Looks like the best option might be to have dedicated physical hardware for the purpose.