Windows 7 guest poor audio (crackling & distorted)

[sogg]

Hey guys, i have workstation 7.1.4 running on my windows 7 64bit host. My guest is a windows 7 32bit system that i use for work. Now the issue i am having is that when audio plays thru the guest it comes out all crackly and distored. Works fine on the host tho??

I have tried uninstalling and re installing VMtools but the issue still occurs. The house audio driver is: Realtek High definition audio.

Can anyone help me fix this?

Thanks!

[EtreLibre]

Same problem here.

[0WayneH0]

I have a similar set-up here. 7.1.4, Win 7 64-bit host, Win 7 32-bit guest. I thought I also had Realtek HDA, but it's listed as "High Definition Audio Device" only. (I may be thinking of Realtek from some other hardware in my house).

Anyway, not that this helps you, but I can get sound OK through my Win7 guest even when another XP guest is under reasonable load. The only time I have experienced crackling and distortion is when trying to use USB headphones, but the USB problems are well known with 7.x.

I tested this also on the beta and found the same result; playing though VM audio hardware it was fine (and actually the machine I tested on may be the one with Realtek HDA), except for when playing through USB when actually it was pretty terrible. So it seems in that beta at least the USB audio support isn't any better any potentially worse (although on a different machine it's not an apples to apples comparison I am making).

Notably I am not runnign Win7 SP1 due to the documented lack of support for that at this time. I'm not sure if that is relevant for you.

[bheiser]

I'm having this issue too.  I initially had trouble getting the audio to work at all ... as I described here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1769349

That problem has been solved by updating the (actually regressing to an older) driver in the host OS.

Now, when I'm in the guest OS, the audio devices function, but are too garbled to be usable.  Interestingly, it's not consistent across applications.  If I stream music using Winamp, it plays, not perfectly, but reasonably well.  However if I, say, use the Windows "sound recorder", then play it back, it's all garbled.  If I try to use VOIP with a SIP client (X-Lite 4) it's garbled.  If I leave a VM on a remote number, that recording is garbled too ... so it's not just sound thru the headphones that's garbled, it's both inbound & outbound audio.

This is with a Windows 7 SP1 x64 host OS, Win7 SP1 x86 guest OS.  The audio device I am using is Realtek, and I'm now using the Realtek Audio driver v6.0.1.6235 from Asus (Asus P8P67 Deluxe).

I have tried this in Vmware Player 3.1.x as well as Vmware Workstation 7.1.4.

This is rendering VMware unusable for my application so any thoughts on possible workarounds would be appreciated.

Message was edited by: bheiser to fix bad url

[greytop]

Same problem here -- with USB audio. That problem is also reported here: Windows 7 Guest OS distorted audio using USB

In my case, I see that AUDIODG.EXE, a local service part of Windows 7 audio, is running at > 20% CPU. That is almost certainly the cause of the problem.

I made most of the crackling go away by choosing a USB audio device that allows the sample rate to be adjusted downwards (in this case a Logictech device). You'll find this under Sound -> Playback ->  Right click properties of device -> Advanced. I chose 2 channel, 16 bit, dictation quality. My Syntek USB audio device did not allow this "fix".

I have had other stability issues. Sometimes when I unplug the USB audio device, the guest OS goes berserk. With task manager (displaying all processes), I see that System (user name: SYSTEM, the NT Kernel) graps almost 100% of CPU. OOUUCH!!!  The solution here is to do ctrl-alt-insert and then choose to shut down without the updates (with a new Windows 7 installation there seem to always be updates pending). The VM machine must then be powered-off. Otherwise, it'll continue to misbehave after rebooting. I don't know whether this is related to the audiodg problem. The solution here is to not unplug the USB device while VM is running.

I am using Windows 7 (32 bit) on Windows 7 (64 bit), both Home Premium. Host CPU is Intel Core2 Quad Q8200, host RAM 8GB.  I use one processor for my Windows-7 guest that has 2GB RAM allocated.

I hope vmware will be able to address the USB audio issues. I'm using the virtual machine to run a language course program that can only be installed on one machine --- so far, it's been a really bumpy ride with multiple calls to vendors of my software as I've had to reinstall everything a couple of times! (I tried to migrate a machine made with VirtualBox -- very bad idea. Vmware is more stable than Virtualbox in the sense that it has never blue-screened the host.)

[Scissor]

Hi Greytop.  Welcome to the forums!

greytop wrote:

Same problem here -- with USB audio. That problem is also reported here: Windows 7 guest poor audio (crackling & distorted)

In my case, I see that AUDIODG.EXE, a local service part of Windows 7 audio, is running at > 20% CPU. That is almost certainly the cause of the problem.

Is this high CPU on your Host or Guest OS?

I have had other stability issues. Sometimes when I unplug the USB audio device, the guest OS goes berserk. With task manager (displaying all processes), I see that System (user name: SYSTEM, the NT Kernel) graps almost 100% of CPU. OOUUCH!!!  The solution here is to do ctrl-alt-insert and then choose to shut down without the updates (with a new Windows 7 installation there seem to always be updates pending).

I am sure you were just making a joke, but just in case you were not.... Windows 7 machines should not "always" have updates pending to be installed.  If you really do have this problem with updates that do not install I would troublshoot why.

I took a look at your attached .vmx file and notice some things...

debugStub.winOffsets.version = "7"

debugStub.winOffsets.value = "0xb8,0xb4,0x18,0x188,0x16c,15,408,0x268,0x260,0x230,0x218,0x88,0x28,0x18,0x20,0x24,1,0x280,0x0,0xc,0x14,0x200000,0x1a8,0xc,0xc,0x18,0x12c,0x1ec"

Not sure what these above lines do.  I suggest removing these lines to test.

ehci.present = "FALSE"

I think that this above line disables the (virtual) USB 2.0 controller, forcing everything to go through the (virtual) USB 1.x controller. 

After trying the above... if it doesn't help, can you attach the vmware.log file from the directory containing the Guest?  the vmware.log file is more helpful then just the .vmx file. 

Thanks!

[bheiser]

FYI to those of you experiencing this issue  - I have made some progress with it.  After doing quite a bit of searching around, I found a reference to a "known issue" involving, believe it or not, the number of CPUs allocated to the VM.

I have set my VM to use just one CPU core.  Now, though there's still some stuttering, the audio is actually usable (for VOIP).

For my particular application, running office apps & conducting SIP/VOIP calls, this isn't a total solution, but is serving as a viable workaround.

[greytop]

Thanks Scissor for helping out!!

Same problem here -- with USB audio. That problem is also reported here: Windows 7 guest poor audio (crackling & distorted)

In my case, I see that AUDIODG.EXE, a local service part of Windows 7 audio, is running at > 20% CPU. That is almost certainly the cause of the problem.

Is this high CPU on your Host or Guest OS?

This is the guest OS cpu -- around 12% if I don't run the Sound control panel --- if I do, then CPU spikes to > 50%. The URL above was wrong: I meant to point to the the similary titled post Windows 7 Guest OS distorted audio using USB, where GraebeRob seem to have run into the same problem very recently.

I have had other stability issues. Sometimes when I unplug the USB audio device, the guest OS goes berserk. With task manager (displaying all processes), I see that System (user name: SYSTEM, the NT Kernel) graps almost 100% of CPU. OOUUCH!!!  The solution here is to do ctrl-alt-insert and then choose to shut down without the updates (with a new Windows 7 installation there seem to always be updates pending).

I am sure you were just making a joke, but just in case you were not.... Windows 7 machines should not "always" have updates pending to be installed.  If you really do have this problem with updates that do not install I would troublshoot why.

Yes, joking, sorry should have made that clear -- it takes many reboots before a fresh installation has run out of updates. The updates are of course slowed down by a couple of orders of magnitude in this kind of situation -- so it may take a day or two before the VM becomes useable again

I took a look at your attached .vmx file and notice some things...

debugStub.winOffsets.version = "7"

debugStub.winOffsets.value = "0xb8,0xb4,0x18,0x188,0x16c,15,408,0x268,0x260,0x230,0x218,0x88,0x28,0x18,0x20,0x24,1,0x280,0x0,0xc,0x14,0x200000,0x1a8,0xc,0xc,0x18,0x12c,0x1ec"

I removed them. Didn't help.

Not sure what these above lines do.  I suggest removing these lines to test.

ehci.present = "FALSE"

I think that this above line disables the (virtual) USB 2.0 controller, forcing everything to go through the (virtual) USB 1.x controller.

Yeah, I had disabled USB 2.0 to see whether that would help. It didn't. So I've reenabled USB 2.0 (and echi.present became TRUE).

Another USB problems: after resuming, VM sometimes hangs. It will not react to attempts to disconnect USB headset. When pulling the USB out (physically), I getpop-up window, something happens:

   Unable to connect USB device to the virtual machine (error code 13). Please contact VMware, Inc. technical support for assistance.

Then at other times -- the most frequent problem serious problem -- the VM simply hangs (freezes). I then try to power the VM off -- but that doesn't help. I kill the VMWARE-WMX.EXE processs on host --- in these situations it consumes no CPU. Then, I restart VM. The enclosed vmware.log shows such a scenario -- I killed the VM at the end of the log. Scissor -- please do have a look!  Windows 7 events on guest didn't show anything that looked interesting.

My suspicion is that there are flaws at work in the innards of VMware: USB malfunctioning with Windows 7 (32bit guest) on Windows 7 (64bit host) seems to be the common denominator here.

My next step will be to migrate this recalcitrant Virtual Monster to a Ubuntu 11 host. That should end late niter's and bring spousal peace. I keep telling her that for years I've never had VM problems of note.

Any advice appreciated...

GT

[michaeljf]

I'm seeing the same bad behavior in Workstation 8.0.1.  The guest is Win2003(32bit).  The host is Win2008(x64) with 16gig RAM.  The problem does not appear to occur when manually opening an audio file using Media Player or other player.  The issue only seems to occur when an audio file is opened by a process.  Like a ding set off by instant messenger or a "got mail" chime or the Windows welcome music that plays at startup.

[freebeing]

Please, can you try with the new Workstation 8.0.2 ?

[michaeljf]

Interesting that Workstation never notified me of the 802 update.

Anyway, I just upgraded from 8.0.1 to 8.0.2 and the audio issue is the same.  Of course, I also upgraded the Tools installation in the guest, but that did not help either.

[jschellhaass]

There was a thread about this in the 8.0 beta forum.

If I remember correctly the solution was on the guest  go to Control Panel, Sound, open the default sound device, click on the Advanced Tab and make sure it's set to 24 bit sound.

jeff

[michaeljf]

Unfortunitely, there does not appear to be a "bit" setting for the Creative audio device.  Hardware acceleration for it is set to full.

So far here is what I have tried, yet none have helped the problem:

• upgrade from Workstation 801 to 802
  
• increase the memory in the guest
  
• change from 1 cpu to 2 in the guest
  
• defrag the disks, both for the guest and the host
  

Finding thus far:

• problem started after upgrading from Workstation 7.1.4 to 8.0
  
• problem appears worse in 32bit Windows guests (e.g. XP, Win2003-x86)
  
• problem reproduces on an idle Windows guest equally as bad as a loaded gues
  

I wanted to test one of the failing guests in Workstation 7, but am now unsure if that would work since the VM Tools have been upgraded to 8.  I guess I could uninstall the tools (8) then reinstall 7 after moving to Workstation 7