Summary: Why is there no audio in the spice viewer if PulseAudio is not running?

I have been battling muted audio in virt-manager for some time. I finally figured out that it is really a spice viewer problem (spicy) rather than a QEMU problem.

The problem is that spicy does not output any audio unless I have PulseAudio setup and running. If I attempt to run spicy from a terminal and connect to a VM (running Fedora 23), I get warnings like the following when I am not running PulseAudio:

GSpice-WARNING **: PulseAudio context failed Connection refused GSpice-WARNING **: pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

And there is no sound. If I launch PulseAudio and try again, there is sound.

It looks like at one point the '--with-audio=gstreamer' configure parameter was added to spice-gtk3 [0]. However, it was reverted a few weeks later [1]. So, I have a couple questions:

- Why was the reversion necessary? There is a forum post on that bug where someone has the complete opposite problem I am having. - Is there some way to make spicy output sound without PulseAudio as a dependency?

I have filed a bug on spicy's bugtracker [2], and a developer claims that by switching '--with-audio' to gstreamer, it is possible to make sound output work on both PulseAudio and plain ALSA. I have tried recompiling with '--with-audio=gstreamer', but I was not able to get sound output in plain ALSA. Has anyone had success recompiling with '--with-audio=gstreamer'?

Any insight to the root of the problem would be appreciated.

--Kyle Terrien

[0] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/41492 [1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/41740 [2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93544