Audio Lag?

[code_nomad]

I'm kind of at a loss, because I can't remember if I've always had this problem or not. I want to say I remember audio working properly, and now it's not.

In all my guests, no matter the OS, I get about a half second of audio lag. It's most obvious when watching a video or playing a game. I first noticed in in Linux, but I've since tested it on my Win10 guests and they have the same lag. I've tried a few settings from an article I found on reducing latency in VMware audio, but it has done nothing.

I haven't been able to find anyone else complaining about audio lag, so it's possible it's something on my end. What could be causing this? Using Workstation 12 on a beefy Win10 host. I installed Player on my wife's computer (also beefy, also Win10) and she gets the same lag. Am I just crazy and VMware has always had laggy audio? Surely something has to be wrong.

[continuum]

In the past we used to fight lags by using VMs with a single vCPU and a carefully tuned amount of vRAM.
But honestly I would say that to get any decent sound out of a VM I would use an external USB-soundcard
I tried one from Tascam and one by Steinberg - both get acceptable results.

[0WayneH0]

I'm not sure if it's related or not, and this is mostly anecdotal, but right now I am running WS 11.1.3 and audio is pretty good.

I can play audio in a VM and it's fine. I can even play audio in a VM that I am connected to on a remote (local LAN) desktop/server and the quality is good enough that it's quite usable (has the occasional hiccup, but pretty rarely).

A few weeks back I tried upgrading to WS 12.1 since it was just made available through my company's IT deployment infrastructure, and I found that after upgrading the sound via the remote server that was previously pretty good became absolutely awful (laggy, crackly, broken). I tried a few things to rectify it (some helped, but not enough), so in the end the quickest solution for me was to go back to WS 11.1.3. (Somehow in this process I managed to kill a VM; couldn't get it open in WS 11.1.3 anymore, so had to revert to a backup, which was not a drama; just mentioning it as an FYI).

Local VM audio, however, in WS 12.1 did not seem to be affected (at least not that I recall). I was somewhat distracted by the regression in audio over the server connection so I can't really claim too much about it either way.

I was going to wait for a few more 12.1.x updates before trying that again, but the recent news about Workstation has me wondering whether I won't be on 11.1.3 for some time now.

Cheers.

[WhiteKnight]

I'm experiencing the same problem.

It's particularly annoying with the default audio device: Whenever a Windows message box pops up in the guest, for example, my guests hang for 30 seconds!

I'd been talking to VMware support and they suggested to add/change the .vmx audio device from

sound.virtualDev = "hdaudio"

to

sound.virtualDev = "es1371"

How my guests don't hang for 30 seconds but just for 0 to 5 seconds (varying).

Please, VMware, get this fixed !!!!! This is sooo annoying!

[WhiteKnight]

"How" should have read "Now". Can't edit because the forum's Action button doesn't work.

VMware company's performance is in a very bad shape. I suggest it gets some serious reorganization to uplift.

[WhiteKnight]

It's easy to verify: Just start Narrator in Windows 10 guest and have it read long texts while you type or select text in Notepad:

You'll notice it'll hardly read five words in a row.