HOWTO: Enable Sound in VMware Player Guest OS

[Snowhog]

Apparently, VMware Player sets its config file for the virtual machine to use Sound Blaster emulation. When in truth, the emulation should be Creative AudioPCI (ES1371,ES1373).

So if you have working sound on your host system, but not on the vm running in VMware Player, here are the configuration lines in your VMs .vmx file you need to have in order to enable sound in the virtual machine running in VMware Player:
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
sound.filename = "-1"
sound.autodetect = "TRUE"

Just make sure to edit/add the lines while your virtual machine is powered off.

Found this doing Google searches this evening. Modified my .vmx file accordingly and viola, I have sound in my Win XP virtual machine guest!

[johnmac2]

Re: HOWTO: Enable Sound in VMware Player Guest OS

I have this problem but (this is where I parade my ignorance) how do I edit my vmx file. It is an exe type file?


I have Ubuntu 8.10 and now Kubuntu 9.04 running as guests on XP using Vmware. I had similar probs with Ubuntu until I upgraded to 8.10.

[dibl]

Re: HOWTO: Enable Sound in VMware Player Guest OS

how do I edit my vmx file.

It is a plain text file -- ".vmx" is the suffix - edit it using kate.

[johnmac2]

Re: HOWTO: Enable Sound in VMware Player Guest OS

Ok thanks for that hint, I have sound (garbled unfortunately) One step at a time.

[Detonate]

Re: HOWTO: Enable Sound in VMware Player Guest OS

I've noticed that only one system can use the sound at a time. If I have my streaming radio playing, and then start XP in my VMWare Player, I get an error message that the sound is disabled. It runs, fine, just no sound. If I start XP and the sound is not being used by another program, then I have sound in XP. No biggy, just an observation.

[dibl]

Re: HOWTO: Enable Sound in VMware Player Guest OS

I've noticed that only one system can use the sound at a time. If I have my streaming radio playing, and then start XP in my VMWare Player, I get an error message that the sound is disabled. It runs, fine, just no sound. If I start XP and the sound is not being used by another program, then I have sound in XP. No biggy, just an observation.

Yes, that is my observation also. Either the host OS uses the sound system, or else the VMWare Player OS uses it, but they cannot share the use of it.

The same goes for plugged USB devices, by the way.

[Detonate]

Re: HOWTO: Enable Sound in VMware Player Guest OS

The same goes for plugged USB devices, by the way.

That's good to know. So if I want to use a flash drive in XP, will XP see it if I unmount it in the host first? Because it automatically mounts when you plug it in. Time to do a little experimenting.

[dibl]

Re: HOWTO: Enable Sound in VMware Player Guest OS

On my rig, the rules appear to work like this:

Sound -- if some audio function is first started in Linux, then VMWare Player/XP is started, sound will not be available in XP. If no audio was running in Linux when VMWare Player was launched, then the XP guest can play tunes.

USB Storage -- similar story. If the flash drive was already plugged in and recognized by Linux before opening the VMWare Player, then it is not automatically mounted there. If it is "safely removed" from the Linux session, then it may or may not appear in XP. However, if the device is plugged in after the VMWare Player XP guest is already running, it will automatically be grabbed and mounted in XP, and the Linux host won't see it.

When VMWare Player is running, the "Device" menu can be used to enable and disable connected things, within limits, and when disabled for the guest OS, they often become available to the host Linux system.

I know that's less that totally deterministic, but that's what I observe on my system.