Fake a sound card for machine without one
 

I have an application that needs to run on a bunch of servers. There is a problem with this application that it needs to open a sound card and output some sound. The servers have no sound cards. We have tried A USB plugin, and that mostly works, but there are often glitches. I'm looking for a better alternative. We don't need to actually hear the sound. Is there a way to have an "anechoic chamber" sound card in software? Like maybe a driver that just throws the sound away, but gives all the responses as if there were a sound card?

Try adding this to modprobe.conf :
And load this module:
It should work in most cases without any other configuration needed.

Almost every motherboard still has a built in speaker even if no speaker was soldered on. Can you use it?


I suppose someone has a virtual sound card.


The virtual machines may have even borrowed someone's prior work. Might look into that.

Now that I read the above I like his way better.

The snd-dummy idea seems workable. I only need to fool the program, not listen to the sound. But all the various ops need to look right, such as setting the sample rate. It needs to be able to get the same thing back when it asks for the sample rate. If sound cards have a loopback that can be turned on, this might need to be implemented.