Workstation Pro 14 audio issues

[HLBenton]

Hello everyone,

I'd appreciate some help with an audio issue, specifically a problem with USB headset.

I have an HP Elitebook 850 G2 running Ubuntu 17.04 with the latest, stable, mainline kernel (4.13.11 at time of writing).

I have manually patched the kernel to fix the 'out of memory' error (see here; http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=2066 thanks to Guilherme Duarte!)

My guest OS is a fully patched Windows 10 (1703 build) and I have edited its vmx file to replace the line sound.virtualDev = "hdaudio" with sound.virtualdev = "es1371" and I have checked that Windows 10 shows the VMWare VMaudio (VMAUDIO) (WDM) audio driver in Sound, video and game controllers (this resolves the crackling audio playback issues). Thanks to numerous others for that tip!

I have found that the audio playback quality is actually quite good if i DON'T pass the USB device through to the guest with this configuration, but it is echo-y and crackles if I do.

I have selected USB 2.0 in the Workstation Pro settings, but it's worth mentioning that my computer is less than two years old and does not have any USB 2.0 ports.

The end result is good quality playback from Windows over my headphones, but a strange buffering issue if I try to use Skype for Business or apps that require the microphone. For example, a simple test call might repeat chunks of dialogue so when I say 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 the other person on the line hears 1 2 3 4 4 4 5 5 6 7 8.

Is anyone aware of any undocumented buffering settings I can try? Or have any other idea what might be wrong?

Sincere thanks!

[mhampto]

Here are a couple articles that may help. The first one may not apply as it is for an older version of Windows:

• Vista and Windows 2008 server virtual machines on VMware Workstation (2012007)
• Skype is not working in a Workstation virtual machine (2030546)

[HLBenton]

Thanks for taking a look mhampto, but sadly these are articles I've already read and followed.

It's apparent that there is a larger problem here given that these issues were all encountered previously with Solus Linux as the host, Workstation 12.5 and Windows 7 as the guest.

Much as before, I have had to revert to using Virtualbox for the moment since these issues don't occur with that hypervisor.

In fact, the reason I moved to Ubuntu from Solus and upgraded to Windows 10 in my guests was as part of an attempt to resolve this audio issue using a supported platform (Ubuntu).