[Solved] No sound in virt-manager/qemu

Message

Infernal_pizza · Post by **Infernal_pizza** » Mon Mar 30, 2026 12:13 am

I can't get any sound out of my VM's in virt-manager/QEMU. QEMU has the alsa, pipewire, pulseaudio, and spice USE flags set. I've tried all 3 sound devices in the VM config and made sure spice-vdagent was installed on Linux guests and Spice guest tools for Windows.

I've tried following the steps from this post but I just get this error: XML document failed to validate against schema: Unable to validate doc against /usr/share/libvirt/schemas/domain.rng
Element domain has extra content: qemu:commandline

I've tried running virt-manager as both a system and user session but it makes no difference. I have also tried accessing the guest via remote-viewer spice://127.0.0.1:5900 but there is no sound there either

I'm running KDE with Pipewire and OpenRC, audio from all other apps works fine.

soundrolf · Post by **soundrolf** » Mon Mar 30, 2026 12:19 pm

can you show:

Code: Select all

cat /proc/asound/cards

Infernal_pizza · Post by **Infernal_pizza** » Mon Mar 30, 2026 4:30 pm

This is what it shows:

0 [NVidia ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
HDA NVidia at 0xfc080000 irq 103
1 [Generic ]: HDA-Intel - HD-Audio Generic
HD-Audio Generic at 0xfca00000 irq 105
2 [Snowball ]: USB-Audio - Blue Snowball
BLUE MICROPHONE Blue Snowball at usb-0000:2a:00.1-2, full speed

I guess it should be using 1 [Generic ]: HDA-Intel - HD-Audio rather than the Nvidia one since I'm using my front panel audio rather than HDMI

soundrolf · Post by **soundrolf** » Mon Mar 30, 2026 6:16 pm

Code: Select all

defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.pcm.device 0 


pcm.snd_card {
        type hw
        card 1
        device 0
}

ctl.snd_card {
        type hw
        card 1
        device 0
}

pcm.dmixer {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
    ipc_perm 0666
    slave.pcm "snd_card"
    slave {
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 4096
        rate 44100
        channels 2
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

pcm.dsnooper {
    type dsnoop
    ipc_key 2048
    ipc_perm 0666
    slave.pcm "snd_card"
    slave
    {
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 4096
        rate 44100
        channels 2
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

copy the code and give this code .asoundrc name
copy .asoundrc to your Home folder
logout your System
and login after

should work

Infernal_pizza · Post by **Infernal_pizza** » Mon Mar 30, 2026 7:03 pm

That worked thanks! Would you mind explaining what it did, or is there any documentation you could link me to?

soundrolf · Post by **soundrolf** » Mon Mar 30, 2026 7:46 pm

https://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Asoundrc

Infernal_pizza · Post by **Infernal_pizza** » Mon Mar 30, 2026 9:46 pm

Thanks! For anyone else having this issue you also need to edit /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf and add the line group = "kvm"

This was one of the fixes I tried previously and the sound broke again after I reverted it