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According to the VirtualBox changelog, version 3.2.0 added support for audio input on Mac OS X hosts.

I'm currently running version 4.0.6 which is the newest version and am trying to use my Macbook Pro's built-in microphone in a Windows XP virtual machine. It doesn't seem to work, however. I tried all settings in the Windows VM, as well as the various audio settings in for the VirtualBox VM itself, to no avail.

Does anyone have experience with this, whether positive or negative?

Is there anything I could do, apart from buying an external USB sound card / USB headset as was apparently the only way to do it back in 2009? (as was suggested in this old pre-3.2.0 SuperUser question here)

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Can't answer, but I can say that on my Macbook Pro 6,2, using VirtualBox 3.2.10 running an Ubuntu 10.11 virtual machine, the inbuilt OS X microphone works fine. Have you installed the guest additions? Because that's the only thing I can think of, having no experience of Windows XP VMs on OS X. – Lukasa May 14 '11 at 18:42
Tried again in a fresh virtual machine with a vanilla Windows XP installation, and it worked (I probably should have done that straight away). So, I assume there was something wrong with the other Windows XP (possibly something connected to the fact that I had carried it over since very early VirtualBox versions). [edit: Lukasa I did have the guest additions installed and up-to-date so that was not the problem] – stff00 May 14 '11 at 19:35
It was a shot in the dark anyway. Congratulations on sorting that problem out though! – Lukasa May 14 '11 at 21:19
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I can answer this myself now, since it appears it was actually a problem with the particular Windows XP installation I was dealing with.

A clean installation in a new virtual machine 'solved' the problem, i.e. I was able to use the built-in microphone for audio input. Moving installed software from the old to the new VM was then the easiest thing to do. Who knows what particular problem in the old XP installation was the exact cause...

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