HD Audio in VMware Fusion 4 and VMware Workstation 8

I was part of Interactive/Virtual devices team at VMware and it was a great learning experience.

In my last 18 months at VMware, I worked on designing and implementing virtual HD Audio device and now since releases of VMware Fusion 4 and VMware Workstation 8 have been made public I can talk about it :)

In addition to Windows Vista and above guests, virtual HD Audio device should work out-of-box for Mac OS Lion 10.7 guests on Fusion 4.0 and hence Fusion users will be able to get sound from their Mac OS guests. Linux guests (3.0+) are supported as well. Patch submitted to Linux kernel that enabled support for Linux guests with VMware HD Audio device.

Virtual HD Audio supports upto 7.1 surround sound, 192kHz sampling frequency, 32-bit samples.

I just downloaded the Fusion 4.0.1 GA and was eager to checkout how well the feature works with Windows 7 guest. Here is a screenshot...

From Blogger Pictures

We've had trouble getting good sound quality with surround sound on Linux hosts with VMware Workstation 8 with default settings.

If you want good quality surround sound support on Linux hosts with Workstation then I'd recommend using channel-mapped device string as follows: (We couldn't implement this programmatically because of stability issues with alsa-lib that enumerates devices on Linux).

1) Suspend/Power off the VM.
2) Run `aplay -L` on your Linux host terminal
3) If you are playing 5.1 surround sound from the guest then copy surround51:CARD=vendor-name,DEV=num
For e.g. `surround51:CARD=Live,DEV=0`
4) Open .vmx config file of the VM in a text editor and edit sound.fileName field
For e.g. sound.fileName="surround51:CARD=Live,DEV=0"
sound.autodetect = "FALSE" should be edited too.

5) Resume/Power on the VM

Similarly if you face quality issues with regular stereo sound on Linux host with Workstation 8.0 then you can try the above mentioned suggestion with device string starting with "front".