VMware Communities: Message List - VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

vincew — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:58:40 GMT

Curious if you have a fresh install of 9.10? I upgraded from 9.04 and sound in my XP Guest is still choppy long after startup. I've tried the other hints in this thread but with no luck. Any suggestions welcome..

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

ritterwolf — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:47:30 GMT

I haven't had the need to tune anything for Workstation 7. Sound is choppy to start, but it stabilises very quickly. I think its an artifact of the host, rather than the guest, because RhythymBox does the same thing sometimes.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

bobdevis — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:29:08 GMT

I can confirm that the Pulseaudio problem went away with Workstation7.
The "ALSA default sound card" option hooks onto Pulseaudio perfectly.

If you have choppy sound in a Windows guest do not forget to turn off sound hardware acceleration inside the guest.
XP Guest > Control Panel > Sound and Audio Device Properties > Volume > Speaker Settings > Advanced > Performance
Set the Hardware Accel and the Sample Rate to the lowest settings and reboot the guest.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

keithdart — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:42:21 GMT

Isn't that also tuneable with kernel config options? There is the selection "server" vs. "low-latency desktop".

I have not experience this choppiness, except for the startup sound when the disk is also in heavy use.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

ksc — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:38:52 GMT

Mulchman wrote:
The latest VMware Workstation 7 supports ALSA. I've been using it for a few hours (on a 64 bit Fedora 11 installation) and it's been tremendous finally having sound, albeit not the best quality and kind of choppy/scratchy sometimes, coming from my Windows XP virtual machine.

The choppy/scratchy is actually a Linux scheduler regression somewhere around 2.6.29 - the scheduler is so proactive about moving threads to a single core to power down other cores that it ends up creating large latency problems on that one core. I shouldn't single out Linux either - Windows 7 has the same behavior, though it's less pronounced.

We're actively looking into workarounds. A CPU-intensive guest workload tends to avoid the regression.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

Mulchman — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:03:43 GMT

The latest VMware Workstation 7 supports ALSA. I've been using it for a few hours (on a 64 bit Fedora 11 installation) and it's been tremendous finally having sound, albeit not the best quality and kind of choppy/scratchy sometimes, coming from my Windows XP virtual machine.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

raywood — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:50:27 GMT

I can't say. But I've been installing a VirtualBox VM in the meantime. I need the audio to work reliably.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

sile — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:05:31 GMT

Maybe our distributions should make it easy to swtich from alsa over to oss4.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

keithdart — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:06:48 GMT

Shoot, even supporting the ALSA interface would be great. The OSS interface they still use has been deprecated long ago.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

Mulchman — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:22:56 GMT

One other thing I suggest people with this issue to do is submit a feature request to VMware for supporting PulseAudio in future versions.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

Mulchman — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:08:14 GMT

Shutting down the computer overnight doesn't have anything to do with this. What does have to do with this is the hardware in your computer and that's also why many people have many different results (because everybody has different hardware).

The best results I had with this problem were right around April 7th when Ubuntu 9.04 had just come out and I moved to Luke's PPA (+ I was using a Turtle Beach sound card). Everything worked fantasticly at that time. Since then, the Turtle Beach card mysteriously died and I've had to switch to a card that came with the motherboard that uses the HDA Intel driver and it's just awful. I can't play any sound on the host OS for longer than a couple of seconds without ALSA dying and spamming the syslog.

Anyway, my point is that there are solutions out there that have been posted by many people but those solutions really only work if you have matching hardware. Until VMware Workstation supports PulseAudio natively we're just going to have to suffer with "fixes" and "solutions" that don't really fix or solve anything.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

raywood — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:48:21 GMT

By the way, I've just discovered that shutting down the computer overnight has at least temporarily fixed the problem. Possibly this was a factor behind the appearance that other "solutions" actually made a difference. Maybe we all just needed to take a break.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

raywood — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:22:49 GMT

Has there been a clear solution to the problem of stuttering audio yet? I am using WinXP in a VMware Workstation 6.5.2. VM on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). I have tried a number of suggestions. A couple of them seemed to work for a day or so, but then the problem returned. This seems, so far, to be one of those situations where what works for one person does not work for another, and vice versa, possibly because of some larger underlying issue.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

RDaly — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:39:02 GMT

I tried using the padsp method... It worked once, but then VMware started complaining 'cause /dev/dsp was no longer present on the system (modprobe -r removed the device nodes).

I also tried using the LD_PRELOAD, but that just isn't working. The sound adapter won't even connect (I get the little red X over the device on guest startup).

VMware - please fix.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

sile — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:32:01 GMT

Original post method worked for me:

Jaunty 9.04 x64 (Dell D620)

VMWare 6.5.2

I changed /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to:

high-priority = yes
nice-level = -11
realtime-scheduling = yes
realtime-priority = 5
default-fragments = 4
default-fragment-size-msec = 4
resample-method = speex-float-3

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

bobdevis — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:30:32 GMT

fermulator,
Do you refer with the "above instructions" to my 2nd soundcard solution or to the original post?
In case you are referring to mine, here is something you can try;

After your 2nd soundcard is propperly installed, the loopback cabe is in place, do the following;

Make sure pavucontrol is not running
Make sure nothing is making any sound.
Now give the "killall pulseaudio" command in the console.
Start VMWare, start a vm (with its sound output pointed to a dsp device) and let the vm make some sound (*let it play an mp3 or so). You should hear it just fine now.
Now while the mp3 is playing, start pulseaudio again in the console.
Pulseaudio will now fail to hook up to the soundcard that is used by the vm, and will use the other one instead exclusively. This is what you want.
With the soundcard that you are reserving for VMWare muted in pavucontrol AND with pulseaudio failing to hook up to it once, pulseaudio will surely leave that card alone. Also after rebooting.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

fermulator — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:10:48 GMT

I've tried the above instructions on:

Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 Desktop (2.6.28-11-server)
vmware 2.01 (VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.i386)

And I still receive the error: Failed to open sound device /dev/dsp: Connection refused Virtual device sound will start disconnected.

A couple of notes:

In Jaunty (latest released Ubuntu as of this date), all of the oss modules are already removed from the system. So blacklisting wasn't required.
Wrapping vmware-vmx with padsp makes a lot of sense (although most applications don't require this), it still didn't help to enable sound with vmware
The notion of editing "$HOME/.pulse/daemon.conf" is a good idea, but doesn't the vmware-vmx process run as root? So configuring pulse settings for our currently running $USER doesn't make much sense does it? (I could be wrong here though)

What now?

This problem with VMware and PulseAudio is littered all over the Internet. It would be really nice to find a solution that works 100%. (I remember trying this solutionon a previous version of Ubuntu, Hardy I believe, and it worked great!)

To elaborate: I'm very interested in a PROPER solution. Uninstalling PulseAudio, forcing VMware to use OSS, or anything like that isn't really the "right" solution. PulseAudio is a nice audio server, and I'm very much interested to hear if/how people have got VMWare to run with PulseAudio (AND without the stuttering audio problem). crosses fingers !

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

bobdevis — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:59:52 GMT

I tried a lot of stuff but ended up using the surefire permanent way of fixing this by adding an extra soundcard. If you have free PCI/PCIe slots I can reccomend this solution as you do not have to upset your distro sound settings to pull this off.
Appart from needing extra hardware the only inconvinience is that you can not control the volume of your guest with any tool on the host. Just change the volume settings inside the guest!

You need one extra soundcard and one male-male audio cable to connect the output (green) of soundcard A with the line-in (blue) of soundcard B. Use the output of soundcard B for your speakers/headphones.
Once your 2nd audio card is installed, you should have a /dev/dsp and a /dev/dsp1 device or something like that. If you do NOT have 2 dsp devices, your host does not see the 2nd soundcard correctly and there may be a driver issue.

Install "pavucontrol", the Pulseaudio management tool.
In Pavucontrol mute the output device (audio card) that you would like to use for VMWare. What device name corresponds to what dsp device is something you may have to establish expermentally.
If some applications stop making sound now, it means you have to kick their playback stream to the other output device in Pavucontrol.

Now you have one /dev/dsp* device (the one you muted with Pavucontrol) that will not be touched by Pulseaudio. Point VMWare to that device and you are all done!

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

Mulchman — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:52:06 GMT

I'm having really good success - much better than before - with Ubuntu 9.04 (64 bit), VMware Workstation 6.5.2 (build-156735), Luke Yelavich's PPA (brings PulseAudio up to 0.9.15), and wrapping vmware-vmx with libaoss.so (instead of padsp).

Luke's PPA is here: https://launchpad.net/~themuso/+archive/ppa
Instructions for wrapping vmware-vmx with libaoss can be found here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/81742
I also have a slightly modified daemon.conf for PulseAudio: default-fragments & default-fragment-size-msec are both set to 4

With this setup I'm finally able to have sound in both the Host Ubuntu OS and (non-choppy & non-stuttering sound) in a Windows XP Professional (32 bit) virtual machine. Your mileage may very (YMMV) depending on your hardware and what not...

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

Mulchman — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:42:14 GMT

Aaron44126 wrote:
Any other suggestions to fix the stuttering?

I got VMware working with PulseAudio using the information here with no trouble, but audio coming from guests makes a terrible stuttering sound. I tried adding the recommended stuff to daemon.conf and even changing the values but it doesn't seem to make any difference. :-P

I still prefer the stuttering to VMware complaining that the audio device is in use all the time, so thanks for this info!

I too could use some suggestions to fix the stuttering. Even after making changes to daemon.conf enabling real time scheduling and high priority (and making the subsequent changes to the system limits file so the group pulse-rt can actually run pulseaudio at those levels) there is still stuttering. I've tweaked lots of settings and keeping default-fragments & default-fragment-size-msec to low values (like 4 each) makes it sound the best but there is still stuttering and skipping and pulseaudio seems a lot less stable running with high priority and real time scheduling.

My host OS is Ubuntu 8.10 (64 bit) and these are the additions I made to /etc/security/limits.conf for pulseaudio (and make sure the user pulseaudio runs as is in the pulse-rt group):
@pulse-rt - rtprio 99
@pulse-rt - nice -20

Anyway, a native option to route all sound through PulseAudio - like what VirtualBox does - would be a godsend.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

kdart — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 08:36:18 GMT

Just change the sound device to "/dev/dsp" in sound device settings.

THIS is all it took for me to finally get sound working in the guest OS. I dind't even you you could edit that field in settings. Thanks.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

Aaron44126 — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:45:55 GMT

Any other suggestions to fix the stuttering?

I still prefer the stuttering to VMware complaining that the audio device is in use all the time, so thanks for this info!

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

HNH90 — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 06:39:01 GMT

Hi,

I think that you should set the sound card "/dev/dsp" manually on your virtual machine settings.
VMware WS can't detect the sound card after unloading the modules "snd_oss_*" because "/dev/dsp" is automatically deleted when these modules are unloaded on recent Linux distributions.

I got sound with VMware WS 6.5.0 and PulseAudio 0.9.8 in Fedora 8 on 32bit box after changing the setting to "/dev/dsp".
(I didn't get sound with "Auto Detect". )

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

ritterwolf — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:39:55 GMT

Interesting. I only use 32-bitLinux in VMs, so I can't really help.The only thing I can suggest is rebooting to make sure there's no OSS compatibility in the kernel.

I've got it working with Workstation 6.5 final and Ubuntu 8.10 now, using those exact instructions.

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

dowhurst — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:59:02 GMT

I did this with VMware 6.5.0 and Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 32bit exactly as described yet do not get sound. The guest WinXP is set to autodetect sound. No sound is detected. Pulsed is running so I've obviously got some difference going on here. 32 bit vs 64 bit should not make a difference based on your procedure. Not sure why padsp didn't provide the answer.

Thanks for your procedure though! It is a start.

Dow

Re: VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

sseremeth — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:53:06 GMT

Anyone get this working with vmplayer (on Ubuntu Hardy)? I'm having no luck.

VMWare PulseAudio HOWTO

ritterwolf — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:41:19 GMT

Disclaimer: I accept no resposnsibility for any horrible things that happen to you, your computer, and those around you as a result of you following this HOWTO. It may cause you, or those around you, to get fired, kill your dog, insult your mother or make your computer explode and various other things that you might have thought impossible. You follow these instruction at your own risk.

I did this with Workstation 6.5 RC1 build 110068 on Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit.

With that out of the way, the instructions

1. shut down all your virtual machines
2. remove OSS emulation from ALSA, by adding the following lines to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-oss

blacklist snd_pcm_oss
blacklist snd_mixer_oss
blacklist snd_seq_oss

3. unload those modules

$ sudo modprobe -r snd_pcm_oss
$ sudo modprobe -r snd_mixer_oss
$ sudo modprobe -r snd_seq_oss

4. we move the real vmware-vmx executable aside, and create a wrapper script

$ cd /usr/lib/vmware/bin
$ sudo mv vmware-vmx vmware-vmx.real
$ sudo touch vmware-vmx

edit this new vmware-vmx file in your favorite text editor, remembering to start is as root, eg 'sudo vim vmware-vmx'

start: vmware-vmx ----

#!/bin/bash

padsp $0.real "$@"

end: vmware-vmx ----

5. Now to set the required permissions on the wrapper script.

$ sudo chmod a+x,u+s vmware-vmx

6. Now to set the permissions on the library used to send OSS calls to PulseAudio.

$ sudo chmod u+s /usr/lib/libpulsedsp.so

That's it!

I tested this by playing music out of rhythmbox, and logging into a Windows XP guest. When I heard that dreaded login sound, I knew it was all working.

If you get stuttering sound, do the following:

$ sudo adduser $USER pulse-access
$ sudo adduser $USER pulse-rt

and add the following lines to $HOME/.pulse/daemon.conf

start: daemon.conf

high-priority = yes
nice-level = -11
realtime-scheduling = yes
realtime-priority = 5
default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 5
resample-method = speex-float-3

end: daemon.conf

restart the daemon, and stuttering should be better. Try tuning the values in daemon.conf if there is still stuttering.