http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20016
Summary: USB audio device only visible to if VirtualBox is running a virtual machine Product: Wine Version: unspecified Platform: PC OS/Version: Linux Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: normal Priority: P2 Component: -unknown AssignedTo: wine-bugs@winehq.org ReportedBy: richardg1952@yahoo.com
System: Fedora 11 wine-1.1.23-1.fc11.i586 ION TTUSB05 USB Turntable VirtualBox-3.0.6_52128_fedora11-1.i586 Acoustica SpinitAgain (LP to CD or mp3)
I purchased the SpinItAgain software to accelerate the process of converting my +1,000 album collection to mp3. I'd started with Audacity and the USB turntable, but it is a laborious process. SpinItAgain looked promising since it could look up album info on the web.My concern was, would wine be able to access the USB turntable. I installed SpinItAgain and everything worked right out of the box. It would crash every few days, but it would restart and I would carry on. Two days ago the program crashed and could no longer see the USB turntable. I tried rebooting the Fedora 11 host, re-plugging the USB cable, nothing made the USB turntable visible in wine. I was invoking winecfg, selecting the audio tab and checking wave input under ALSA to see if the turntable was visible.
In frustration I started a VirtualBox Windows XP guest with the intention of moving the SpinItAgain to VB. XP under Virtual Box is horribly slow so while waiting for XP to boot, I ran winecfg again and to my amazement the USB turntable was again visible in wave in AlSA. I had been running a Fedora 10 guest in VirtualBox and only shut it down about the time wine lost access to the USB turntable. To confirm that VirtualBox is the magic trigger. I shut down the VirtualBox XP session and checked winecfg - the USB Audio disappears. I then started a Fedora 10 guest under VirtualBox, re-checked winecfg and USB Audio was again under wave in ALSA. With this setup SpinItAgain is working once more.
If I hadn't already had VirtualBox running when I originally installed SpinItAgain the USB turntable would not have been visible in wine and I would have assume the program was unusable through wine with the USB turntable.
It's worrisome that an apparently unrelated application running has such a major impact wine's ability to access a piece of hardware. As this is audio, and the weirdness of pulseaudio coming in to replace ALSA is causing a plethora of problems, I don't feel confident that this workaround will continue to work.
Hopefully this information will be useful to the wine developers.