VMWare and sound device

NDR008 · 12-07-2006, 05:13 PM

I am trying to get my sound card to work on vmware, i set the sound card as autodetect but no luck.
I don't know if it helps but all my progs use alsa to play sound? so what do i have to give as the device path for vmware to find my sound card?

Brian1 · 12-07-2006, 05:34 PM

Are you talking about a vmware guest OS using the same model sound card as installed? If so as far as I know the guest OS use a virtual generic sound device and then vmware transfer to the real sound device.

If normal linux sound is fine and the vmware has no sound then maybe you may need to configure a dmix setup for your sound card. Search here for dmix for info.

Brian

NDR008 · 12-07-2006, 06:15 PM

yeah what i meant is that vmware cannot detect a sound card installed on my pc/linux, but in fact sounds works well on linux (my host os).

Isn't the sound card usually something like /dev/dsp or /dev/snd ?? Does suse deal with it differently?

Brian1 · 12-07-2006, 06:31 PM

Have you installed the vmware-tools for the guest OS? If guest tools exist for the OS. Did not say which guest OS you were running. Been a while since setting up a guest OS under vmware host Linux. Haven't needed a new guest for about 3 years.

As far as I know all linux distro use the device block /dev/dsp for main sound output.

Now the guest OS will not not see the real sound card on the machine. The guest is running in a virtual machine enviroment and only sees that the virtual bios and hardware that is defined.

Brian

Electro · 12-08-2006, 01:22 AM

From VMware manual,

Quote:

VMware Server provides a sound device compatible with the Creative Technology Sound Blaster Audio API adapter and supports sound in Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Linux guest operating systems. The VMware Server sound device is disabled by default and must be installed using the virtual machine settings editor (VM > Settings).
Sound support includes PCM (pulse code modulation) output, and input. For example, you can play .wav files, MP3 audio, and Real Media audio. MIDI output from Windows guests is supported through the Windows software synthesizer. MIDI input is not supported, and no MIDI support is available for Linux guests.
Windows 2000, Windows XP, and most recent Linux distributions automatically detect the sound device and install appropriate drivers for it.

The same goes true for Workstation and Player.

I guess third time is the charm for NDR008 to understand that VMware does not handle PCI devices. Soon VMware will handle PCI and PCIe devices directly when virtual machine extensions starts to be used extensively by chipset and manufactures that makes expansion cards.

matthewg42 · 12-08-2006, 01:35 AM

vmware uses the old OSS drivers. This means it wants the whole soundcard. If you're using gnome or KDE, there'll probably already be a sounds demon attached to the sound ward, and that will prevent vmware from being able to use the soundcard.

Disable the sound demon, make sure no programs are using the sound card (that includes flash player in web pages, music players and so on), and then start vmware.

The old OSS drivers are a pain in the backside for this reason, as are sound demons.

NDR008 · 12-08-2006, 08:55 AM

matthewg42 is the only one who understood what i was saying.
I KNOW that vmware doesn't handle the pci devices. It will act as an application on the host os, and pretend to be a computer for the guest os. when guest os does something like play a sound file, vmware will act as an application and make the host os play the sound.

I have used vmware before but in the reversed situation.
i wanted to run windows XP on linux.

My problem was simple, when I was setting up the virtual devices for my guest os, i selected auto detect for everything, but sound didn't work, on booting the guest os it would say no sound card detected. and the vmware player would show a small cross on the speaker symbol in the bottom right.

Electro · 12-08-2006, 06:26 PM

For OSS (Open Sound System), it depends on the sound card. If the sound card has hardware mixing, there will not be any problems playing multiple sound streams. For a sound card that does not have hardware mixing, you will have to setup software mixing which is not transparent with each program and the program is picky on what options you used to setup software mixing. Majority of the distributions uses artsd which creates a lot of problems and it is worst than other software mixer. Other software mixing are esound (Enlightened Sound Daemon), ALSA's (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) dmix library, and PulseAudio (aka Polypaudio).

VMware is an application but no it does not play sounds as you just stated. It sends the audio in chunks or packets, but does not act like a sound player.

BTW, I prefer a long post instead of a few sentences. Your first post was not detail enough and it is like pulling teeth just to get the information. I thought you did not know because your second post states.

Quote:

yeah what i meant is that vmware cannot detect a sound card installed on my pc/linux, but in fact sounds works well on linux (my host os).

I am sure that matthewg42 had to guess.

NDR008 · 12-09-2006, 04:45 AM

ok, so, i am guessing my laptop doesn't support hardware mixing - but ALSA is being used, so how to do I tell vmware to use my ALSA device?

Thanks.

Electro · 12-10-2006, 04:12 PM

You can not. VMware for Linux only can do OSS. Hopefully, their next version will be using OpenSDL, so the virtual machine can render 3D, provide better fullscreen support, and give us options of sound architecture like ALSA. Right now, you can try an experimental patch that is wrapper that outputs to artsd or esound.

Information about the wrapper:
http://www.gentoo-portage.com/app-emulation/vmware-dsp

Direct connection to the wrapper and other VMware software:
http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/