I was pulling my hair out trying to get audio working in my QEMU virtual machines through Virt-Manager. Everything seemed perfect - the VM booted fine, graphics worked, but absolutely no sound. After hours of debugging, I finally found the solution.
The Problem I Faced I had just migrated my Gentoo system from PulseAudio to PipeWire (because, let's be honest, PipeWire is the best :D ). Everything worked beautifully on my host system, but when I tried to run VMs through Virt-Manager, I hit a wall:
- VMs launched perfectly through Virt-Manager GUI
- Graphics, networking, everything worked except audio
- Direct QEMU command-line worked with audio (which was frustrating!)
- Kept seeing GSpice warnings in Virt-Manager output
- No matter what I tried in the Virt-Manager GUI, no audio devices appeared in the VM !!!