Sound

Linux machines and containers can play sound through your Mac's speakers, AirPods, or headphones, and record from its microphone. Sound is enabled by default and needs no setup.

The virtual sound device uses your Mac's default input and output devices and appears as a standard ALSA sound card in Linux. Both playback and recording are supported.

Use cases

• Voice input in AI agents like Claude Code and Codex
• Playing audio from Linux apps and scripts
• Building and testing audio software with real input and output

Testing

You can test sound with standard ALSA tools (install your distro's alsa-utils package first). Play a test tone:

speaker-test -t wav -c 2

Record from the microphone and play it back:

arecord out.wav    # Ctrl-C to stop
aplay out.wav

The first time you record, OrbStack may ask for permission to use the microphone.

Limitations

• Sound isn't available in isolated machines.
• PipeWire/PulseAudio is not currently available out of the box. You can install it in your machines if needed.