Hi Dorothy
This sounds more like a guest problem - you could probably find more help on the quickemu Discord or looking through github issues/discussions.
It's been a while but changes to Opencore or qemu settings can break audio and other things.
Spice probably isn't redirecting your usb keyboard/mouse - normally it just sends the input to the emulated guest hardware.
It also does this for audio.
I have had OSX Catalina with working sound, and it breaks with Opencore/boot or other changes to the virtual hardware.
Qemu/quickemu and Opencore have to map the intel-hda guest machine "sound card" into something Catalina can use.
I have used USB redirection with Catalina - but you need to make sure Catalina has drivers/kexts for the USB hardware.
Just getting USB working in Catalina was a challenge before - maybe that's been fixed. These were virtual machine/guest settings for usb-ochi/ehci/xhci.
On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 3:09 AM Victor Toso <victortoso@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Dorothy,
On Sat, Apr 27, 2024 at 12:57:49PM GMT, Dorothy Calhoon wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I use spice to redirect the usb ports from my POPos host to my
> Mac Catalina operating system in my QEMU virtual machine which
> was set up using quickemu and now is accessed via quickgui.
> Spice works fine for redirecting the keyboard, mouse, wifi and
> printer. Now I need it for audio.
SPICE supports playback and record audio channels. Playback is
audio coming from the Guest to your Client and Record is client's
microphone to redirect to the guest.
If you already uses usbredir channel, chances are that your spice
client already supports playback/record too. Which spice client
are you using?
> I know that audio has been a problem in virtual machines with
> Mac operating systems later than Catalina, but it is supposed
> to work in Catalina.
If you are using spice-gtk, the audio backend should be gstreamer
and the right plugins need to be installed
> I have a small speaker that plugs into the guest via a usb port
> but it is not recognized. I also tried headphones in the audio
> out ports and still Preferences show nothing for sound and
> there is none.
>
> I understand that spice can allow the audio sound card from the
> host to pass through to the guest. How do I implement that
> feature? Somewhere I read that inputting the following into the
> host terminal would do it: QEMU_AUDIO_DRV= spice. However,
> terminal did nothing and just wanted more instructions. The
> directions I had found said that after this command you could
> then use -soundhw hda options. However, terminal does not
> recognize soundhw and I wasn’t sure exactly what the “options"
> were.
>
> I also tried -audiodev spice,id=id[,prop[=value][,….]] and the
> terminal said that the audiodev command was not found.
I'm not familiar with quickemu nor quickgui, but again, if you
are already using some spice channels, I'd guess the problem is
on the client-side.
> It appears that there are just a couple of commands that would
> allow the audio passthrough feature of spice to work, but I
> don’t know exactly what they are. I am new to using terminal so
> I need very precise instructions. I would appreciate your help
> in this.
>
> Thanking you in advance.
>
> Dorothy
Cheers,
Victor