Stuttering virtualbox sound with windows 7 guest and UBUNTU host

I have installed a Windows 7 as virtualbox-guest. My Ubuntu works as host. The sound is stuttering ugly. I tried to change that by changing the Audio-Controller to ICH AC97 and install the driver downloaded from CHIP. Result: After a restart nothing has changed, Sound stutters like before. Is there a way to get a proper sound? The Guest additions are installed and are working fine.

This is the Ubuntu HOST:

These are the settings of the virtualbox-machine:

Win7, 64bit

Having experienced the same Windows guest stutter under an Ubuntu host (12.04) - except in Win 8.1 - I found a solution that mostly conforms with Takkat's answer. My stutter occurred with the Windows guest being allocated 4 out of 4 cores, but the execution capped at 75%, with 4GB RAM, and 256 MG graphics RAM. Switching to 2 out of 4 cores - but removing the execution cap - running at 100%, eliminated 90% of the stuttering. But not all of it.

The final 10% - and the total elimination of stuttering - came when I switched from the default PulseAudio driver in VirtualBox Manager's settings, to the ALSA Audio Driver. Please note, prior to the aforementioned reallocation of CPU's and execution caps, I had also tried this driver change, and it did not remotely eliminate the stutter. The two changes in combination was required.

Stuttering audio almost always indicates an insufficient performance of hardware, or memory. This also depends much on the audio source, and the software used.

In case you have no sound issues on your host Ubuntu different Pulse Audio settings will not do much about sound issues arising from running a quite demanding guest OS like Windows 7.

To minimize effects coming from limitations of a virtual machine we therefore have to make sure to assign as much hardware ressources to the guest OS as possible, but make sure the host OS is still able to perform well (including Pulse Audio in your case!).

From what we can see from your settings it seems that the requirements to get a smooth audio experience are met. There are few things only we may try to see whether there is an improvement:

• assign 2 of 3 CPU cores without an execution cap (or 3 of 3 but then with an execution cap)
• give the guest OS more RAM (e.g. 3 GB of 4 GB)
• assign 256 MB of graphics RAM.

In case we then have a better sound output we may reduce the ressources step by step to find the optimum setting for the software we run on our guest.

If we still cant get sound output smoothly we may have to try using a software with less demanding sound processing like e.g. WinAmp or Foobar2000 to further track the issue down.

It may however be that your hardware capabilities - even though quite good - still are inssufficient for running Windows 7 and your additional software to play sound (and video?) at the same time.

in Virtual Machine Settings/Audio I changed Host Audio Driver from ALSA Audio Driver -> to PulseAudio and sound became fine. No other changes to configuration (VirtualBox Guest Additions 4.3.12 (CentOS 6.5), by the way)