Audio qube

[cumpsd]

I bought Pebble Pro USB speakers because of this. I also have HDMI sound and only dom0 can control that in my case. So I switched to USB via sys-usb to sys-audio to make it work.

[SteveC]

That’s probably the entire reason I could never get it to work before.

Yeesh, there must have been twenty back-and-forths between enmus and myself! Unfortunately, my speakers don’t work through USB. I suppose I could get some that do work (and find another use for these). I’m actually having to split my HDMI signal (with yet another small box that clutters my desktop) to get these to work.

[Zeno]

If I want to rename the qube sys-audio to my_sys-audio, what needs to be changed?

• default_audiovm to my_sys-audio
• Policy filename to 50-my_sys-audio
• Policy itself, every sys-audio to my_sys-audio

What else?

[Tezeria]

@Zeno

If I want to rename the qube sys-audio to my_sys-audio, what needs to be changed?

If I’m not mistaken, if you just renaming sys-audio to my_sys-audio, everything is done automatically. You don’t have to change anything else.

[Zeno]

Audio from other qubes doesn’t work.

Changing back:

• Qube name (my_sys-audio → sys-audio)
• Policy itself, every my_sys-audio to sys-audio

Brings audio back to live.

[Tezeria]

I just try to rename my sys-audio to sys-audio-1 , JUST rename. All was ok for me. I reboot, all was ok too. I revert to sys-audio and all was ok for me…
I just renamed without touching dom0 or any other qubes. I looked in qubes-prefs in dom0 and in a few qubes with qvm-prefs and everything had been modified automatically…

[Zeno]

You check qvm-prefs for audiovm or something else too?

audiovm changes apply automatically, yes, but I have no audio afterwards.

[Tezeria]

@Zeno

You check qvm-prefs for audiovm or something else too?

Just qvm-prefs for 3 4 qubes and qubes-prefs in dom0

[Zeno]

Turns out Qubes don’t like underscores.
Thanks for trying to help.

By the way, are you sure you have renamed the working audio qube? Policies don’t change automatically as qube’s properties.

[Nakaya_kita]

I had set up sys-audio, but I couldn’t manage to get it to work and now I can’t hear any sound when I attach USB audio. I would like to give up and try again later in the day, but what can I do to restore this setting? In the meantime.

qubes-prefs default_audiovm

I’m thinking that if I assign the original qube that is not sys-audio here, it will revert back to the original…

[Nakaya_kita]

How to disable sys-audio?

I’ve been trying to get sys-audio to work with no luck Attempting to make a sys-audio VM: No sound and videos don't play in any VM so now I temporarily have to disable it, but I think I’m missing a step. I got rid of the sys-audio VM and its template and deleted the /etc/qubes/policy.d/50-sys-audio.policy file. The next thing was to unset this preference: qubes-prefs default_audiovm sys-audio So how does one disable a pref set by the qubes-prefs command in dom0?

I was able to get it back to normal when I deleted the policy and also deleted the default_aucdiovm item, referring to this article. This may be too challenging for me now, so I may need to buy a new one that can output audio via HDMI.

[SteveC]

I found myself unable to get sys-audio working at all and I suspect it is because I AM using HDMI to get my sound. (I have yet to buy and try USB speakers.)

So be careful switching to HDMI

[neowutran]

From my understanding, HDMI audio will only work if your gpu contains an audio device and a vga device. In that case you can passthrough the audio part of the GPU to sys-audio, and you will have sound through HDMI. Nvidia and Amd seems to work correctly. It seems that for Intel there is only 1 device that is used for vga+audio. In that case you can’t have HDMI sound in sys-audio unless you do a gpu passthrough

[Raphael_Balthazar]

Glad to see you got it working!

And sorry for the very late answer: I only got this to work with Debian and not Fedora. Of course, like you I tried setting sys-audio as audiovm to sys-audio but that didn’t work for me back then.

What didn’t work for me with Debian was the so called “recommended way”, applying the patch. After that my sys-audio stopped working and there were some error messages. I changed back to the “non recommended way” and this is working.

[Nakaya_kita]

Thanks, I gave up on HDMI actually because I didn’t have enough ports. On the other hand, I was getting sound out of the speakers via BT, but after a few days it stopped working and I couldn’t even get sound out the same way. Now I am using the USB speaker I have been using to produce sound. This is still not inconvenient.

But I would like to try the audio-app again. In the very first step, I created an audio-app, and when I created it, sys-audio (I think) was automatically selected as the template, but when I checked the settings after creating the audio-app, the template changed to debian-12-xfce and there is a triangular alert mark next to it. I think it should be sys-audio here, how should I review the settings?

[Nakaya_kita]

When I checked the error message, I found an item in the Application shown in App Menu column where Thunar was not installed, and when I moved this item to the I should have read the English message a little more carefully…

Also, if anyone is reading this, please let me know, in the audio-template

sudo apt install pipewire-qubesqubes-audio-daemon pavucontrol qubes-core-admin-client When I run qubes-usb-proxy alsa-utils

I get an error saying pipewire-qubesqubes-audio-daemon, this is not found. qubesqubes, I get the same error when I change it to qubes. I think it’s probably because I’m trying to install with the debian template, but can I use another pipewire instead?

[Eleanorrais]

Thanks for making this great guide! I have tried to get an audio vm working but unfortunately I just can’t get it to work. I’ve had some successes, sometimes, but then it stops working again and I can’t reproduce it working anymore.

I’ve followed your steps of making the three qubes (sys-audio, audio-template and audio-qube). I’ve compated all with qvm-prefs so I’m convinced they’re set up right. I’ve gotten the sound test to work in sys-audio too, but that’s where I get stuck. I’ve added the policies, patched the python file, and then reboot my machine, but then there is no sound anymore, not even in sys-audio. That’s when I started to fiddle with the global/local preference for audiovm and reboot sys-audio where at one point it worked for a short while. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to figure out what got it to work, but I had to restore everything back to normal so that at least I have sound again.

What I found interesting is that at the times sys-audio had sound, it showed it’s audio sync (via tray icon menu settings) to be Qubes Virtual Audio Sink. When it wasn’t working, something like Dummy Output showed up here.

I tried to automate the creation of the VMs with Salt while I was setting everything up, when I found out there already exists a salt state for sys-audio (can be executed by sudo qubesctl state.sls qvm.sys-audio). This seems to set up something something similar, but only sys-audio is created. It leaves me with the same non working situation anyways. Is this supposed to be the ‘official’ way as intended by the Qubes devs?

Anyone have any idea how I would be able to proceed next? Any logs I can produce to enable somebody to help me further?

Any help is appreciated!

[PeakUnshift]

@neowutran

Note: You could permanently assign a usb device to a qube using the dom0 command qvm-devices. Example : qvm-devices usb attach --persistent sys-audio sys-usb-1:2-6

The correct command is qvm-device (without s).

Otherwise it’s working well, with a Scarlett Solo sound card and bluetooth headset!

It’s not necessary to install all linux-firmware (almost 200mb). You can simply run sudo dnf install linux-firmware and see which package you need (in my case it was only atheros-firmware).

[PeakUnshift]

What should be the audiovm for sys-audio? If sys-audio itself, then we can’t stop this qube because it says sys-audio is still running as it depends on itself.

[neowutran]

fixed the “qvm-devices”

And for the sys-audio audiovm, you choose (read the posts around this one) :

Audio qube

If you do this, though, you can’t shut sys-audio down (if you ever need to do so) because it is being used as an audio qube by sys-audio. Just something to watch out for.