Strange sound with VMWare Workstation

[Hopachi]

The workaround with the Media Player was mentioned by me in the earlier post on that page . I discovered this too, after countless hours of troubleshooting. But having WMP constantly open in the background is not an option, clearly.
By the way this happens to me with older HOST OS-es as well (Win2003/2008/7) - I even don't have Win8 installed on this machine.

It's either XP and older are completely ignored by vmware already (and we'll never see an update to this problem), or we'll see an update that addresses this after a decade . I'm so pessimistic.

Thanks, but if I remember correctly, your workaround consists of using vmx version 7 and sorry but I use version 9 and it has its own improvements.

As I said earlier, it's good to wait for an update to see what gets resolved.

After a decade there's no point to release fixes to that: if you look at the Win ME / 98 VM tools they still have version 7 even if you update to 9 so that doesn't get updated because OS is too old... so now is the time to fix XP or Win7 before they get too old as well.

 

[garycase]

I agree Workstation v8 and v9 have some nice improvements -- and they work perfectly with Windows Vista, '7, or '8 virtual machines. The bug in XP machines is frustrating -- but not catastrophic. It's VERY interesting that running Media Player resolves it !! That clearly means it's a simple fix ... but just what that might be is a perplexing question. Hopefully VMWare will fix this in their next update !! I did, just for grins, try using Workstation v7, and indeed it works perfectly on a Windows 8 host running the older XP virtual machines.

 

[tedych]

Hopachi, Yes, currently I still use 7.1.4 on my main machine (OS). I have several Win2003/XPs guests that I need. Period.
And I don't think the fact an OS is getting older, should be a reason to ignore it or make it work worse, when they still include it in the ads they support it in their product. They still support Win98 for Christ sake (and I use one for an old scanner - works perfectly for what I need it) . I don't want further updates for XP or something in VMTools. I want the bugs fixed, that's what we need . They have the Tools for XP etc., but they are not working as they should anymore.

So after a decade, they (we) will have issues with Win10 in guests .... just because the current Windows will be Win12 ...

Of course VM9 has its improvements etc. That's why we rant. I want to install 9, but for now I won't.

"but just what that might be is a perplexing question"
- That's something I really hate - to spend countless sleepless nights and weeks chasing a problem that should't have been there in the first place - and it's not my fault or obligation to do software bugs investigations just to be able to USE a software. We are not talking about a small bug which all softwarers have. It's a big bug that prevents many to use that software. The same I have with Photoshop - ever since CS4 (4-5 years ago) I have been experiencing one issue that shortened my life by a decade, spent weeks and months troubleshooting and there is nothing that resolves it, after millions of experiments and things I've tried. Adobe is totally helpless. And it's not a bug out of the thousands small ones, but it actually makes the program(s) literally unusable. Many have the same problems. That's why sometimes I get out of my skin and feel enraged.

 

[Hopachi]

Yes, currently I still use 7.1.4 on my main machine (OS). I have several Win2003/XPs guests that I need. Period.

You can still go to 7.1.6 it's the latest from its branch... so version 7 still got an update this year! They know people are still using version 7 due to the good reputation and stability. :thumb:

 

[tedych]

I think I know what's causing it.
After days of researching about a Photoshop issue, I suddenly thought my findings could have something in common with the VMWare sound issue.
It turns out there is a timing issue, specifically related to OS' internal timer frequency. I use two tools to look at these parameters. WinTimerTester1.1, and TimerResolution.exe.
The first shows the combined source timer frequency used by the OS to keep track of time, the second is used to decrease the period of the internal interrupts timer of the OS.
So, turns out Windows (my testbed Win2008 I tested on today) uses 66Hz (~15ms) interrupts frequency for its internal stuff, which can go up to 1000Hz when a multimedia application requests a timer freq increase to ensure a smooth playback etc.
With this TimerResolution I was able to see 15ms period while idle on my Win2008 OS. When I run WMPlayer, the period drops to 3-4ms. Using the exe I could make it 0.5ms (2000Hz). So it seems that's what WMPlayer is 'doing' when started, so the playback becomes smooth.
So, running a XP/2003 virtual machine in vmware 9, I could recreate the smooth playback in it, using either WMP on the host (or in the guest of course), or setting the timer resolution to max (0.5ms) using the timerresolution.exe on the host (works in the guest too, in which case the vmware monitor sets it on the host too because the guest OS is requesting the high resolution and the only way to service its request is to set the same or higher res on the host).

So, to summarize.
On my rig, Win2008 with VMW9, after I boot the host OS, the timer resolution is 15ms and it doesn't change when I start playback in a virtual machine (maybe it should decrease to 1-3ms but not sure if this is the primary reason here). In that situation if I force somehow the timer to increase frequency (decrease period to 4 or below ms), which is typically done by running WMP or some other multimedia app that does that, or I start TimerResolution.exe and hit Max, the playback is totally fine. I close the app, the timer returns to 15 ms and the playback sucks again. I was able to make it permanent to 0.5ms at one time, not sure how. After I restarted the host, it was back to 15ms and I couldn't recreate the permanent 0.5ms timer. And it shouldn't stay at 0.5 all the time anyway (for performance reasons).

On the same system my main OS - Win7 where I'm still with vmw 7.1.4, the timer is at 1ms (1000Hz) all the time, not sure if this is normal, even after a clean boot when no virtual machine has run at all. This 1 ms state could be related to vmw 7.1.4 being installed, not sure. I'm affraid to update to 9.x here just to test if 9 would work fine.
Maybe the sound buffer in VM XP is smaller and the 15ms timer resolution couldn't handle it. Or smthng like that. Or there must be a way to force the higher resolution when a sound is played in the VM.

Please test and share your findings on that. I think vmware 9 is not playing very well with the OS main interrupts timer that controls everything in the OS.
Test and share what's your timer resolution when idle and no VM running (also write your OS version), and whether the resolution increases (Hz) when you play a sound in the host, and then test when a sound is playing in the VM.

 

[Hopachi]

Sounds interesting.

Where can the timings be seen and where is the TimerResolution.exe ?

 

[garycase]

I found it here: TimerResolution 1.2

Of course, knowing WHAT is going on; and actually resolving it; are two different things. I haven't had a chance to try this yet on the Win8 system, but I assume it will work if I simply run timerresolution from within the XP virtual machine -- but it's just as easy to run Windows Media Player minimized, which also "fixes" the problem. I've got the XP virtual machine set to just run Windows Media Player minimized when it boots. Doesn't fix the start-up sound (which is still distorted -- so I simply set it to not play any startup audio) ... but everything works fine afterwards. I assume I could do the same with timerresolution -- I'll play around with that a bit when I get a chance.

The best thing, of course, would be in VMWare would fix the problem !! (We can always hope )

 

[Hopachi]

I found it here: TimerResolution 1.2

Of course, knowing WHAT is going on; and actually resolving it; are two different things. I haven't had a chance to try this yet on the Win8 system, but I assume it will work if I simply run timerresolution from within the XP virtual machine -- but it's just as easy to run Windows Media Player minimized, which also "fixes" the problem. I've got the XP virtual machine set to just run Windows Media Player minimized when it boots. Doesn't fix the start-up sound (which is still distorted -- so I simply set it to not play any startup audio) ... but everything works fine afterwards. I assume I could do the same with timerresolution -- I'll play around with that a bit when I get a chance.

The best thing, of course, would be in VMWare would fix the problem !! (We can always hope )

Thanks for the link.

I'll see how it goes.
You can disable the startup sounds in your VM, they don't have any purpose. When you use the Win Media Player the sound is good, I'll keep that in mind. I was testing Angry Birds and in this case the sound gets distorted again.

I'm getting the issue on XP SP2 x64 and also on 32bit XP SP3 but sound is disabled.

Let's hope a fix is found.

 

[garycase]

The "fix" of course is to just use VMWare Workstation v7

... but clearly that's not a good resolution. In addition, I had already updated almost all of my virtual machines (~ 3 dozen) to hardware version 8 when I updated to Workstation v8. Since moving to v9, I haven't updated the virtual hardware (and won't) ... but there's no way to downgrade all the VMs to v7 hardware. If there was, I'd likely just do that and use v7 !!

 

[tedych]

garycase, of course they are two different things. All I shared was just thoughts and findings and actually knowing What is going on, could be a leap towards an easy resolution before vmware get their sh** together and release a fix, which I doubt will hapen any time soon.
Also, I played a little with some settings in the .vmx file of my virtual XP/2003's, I suppose there might be some setting that could control that, just I don't know its name yet .
Also the fact that you can run windows media player just on the host, also resolves the issue, speaks for itself .

I can conclude that vmware fails to set the proper timer resolution on the host while the host sound device is used by request of the virtual OS. So most likely it's not VMTools' fault at all (or at least not entirely). My Win7's timer runs at 1000Hz all the time. Maybe the fact vmware 7 is installed and its running drivers/services could be maintaining this frequency all the time.. who knows.
Maybe if it was vmware9, the timer wouldn't stay at 1ms, but would be defaulted to 15ms or so, with the same problems.
You can test your default resolutions of Win7, Win8 etc, with vmw7, 8 and 9 installed, and share .
Actually all this is so arcane that I spent days reading all kind of online stuff (and technical documents from AMD and vmware ), not for the purpose of vmware, but after all it seems to be in line with vmware bug as well.
Yes, the TimerResolution program is that from the link above.

I have another experiment to conduct now - in my Win2008 where I experience the problem, I'll try to increase the res on the host (only) and check how the guest's res would react or will it stay at 15ms as it was.
Because changing it in the guest leads to its change on the host (as I explained above).
I'm curious how other Win7's stack up to mine in regard to this 1ms resolution. My virtual 7's run at 15ms (I just checked) so I'm not sure if and what keeps my host Win7 at 1ms.
Now I just checked also playing a sound in my 7.1.4 virtual Win7 Pro, the timer drops to 1ms immediately (foobar) in the VM. In XP it doesn't.
Hm, actually I remember though, when I did set the timer to 1ms in Win2008 host, and played a sound in VM XP perfectly, the guest timer was at 15ms. So I guess it's all about the host timer to be set appropriately. Now if we find a way to tell vmware9 to set it to 1ms when loading a VM ..

By the way the players or timerresolution.exe, just call some Win API to request increasing of the frequency. If we manage to write a small program or service that just calls this API, we could avoid running WMP etc. Maybe there is a setting in vmware anyway.

 

[garycase]

Actually, running Media Player on the host does NOT resolve the issue. It has to be run on the client. I've simply got the XP virtual machine set so there are no startup sounds, and it auto-runs Media Player minimized, so it's essentially "out of the way". Then the sound works perfectly.

If I get a chance to "play" around a bit, I'll install v7, v8, and v9 and see what the timings look like. But meanwhile it's working fine ... there are only 2 VM's that are used regularly on that system; one is a Windows 7 VM that works perfectly; the other is the XP VM that requires the workaround to make the sound work properly (otherwise it works perfectly). The Windows 7 VM was actually created on VMWare v9, so it's v9 "hardware" -- otherwise I'd just use VMWare v7 and be done with it !!

 

[Hopachi]

The "fix" of course is to just use VMWare Workstation v7

... but clearly that's not a good resolution. In addition, I had already updated almost all of my virtual machines (~ 3 dozen) to hardware version 8 when I updated to Workstation v8. Since moving to v9, I haven't updated the virtual hardware (and won't) ... but there's no way to downgrade all the VMs to v7 hardware. If there was, I'd likely just do that and use v7 !!

   Note

1. uninstall the newer vm tools (version 8 or 9) and shutdown the VM.
2. backup the VMX file, in order to restore it after possible failures.

How to downgrade hardware version:

-open VMX file of VM with notepad
-change hardware version to 7 for the next line:

virtualHW.version = "7"

Inspired from "how to manually upgrade":
http://www.eightforums.com/virtualization/9433-how-manually-upgrade-vms-vmware-player.html

 

[tedych]

You can use an AutoHotKey script. I'll test this in a moment.

DllCall("ntdll.dll\NtSetTimerResolution", UInt, 40000) ;4 ms

This is what I've found as a way to change the resolution without using WMPlayer etc.
Just use autohotkey (I already use it for bunch of automations) and put it in the Startup. Way smaller than WMP in resources and no buttons in the taskbar to get in your way.
WMPlayer sets the timer to something between 3 or 4 ms, so I think 4ms would be a good balance to eliminate the stuttering sound and to not impose heavy load on the system (higher timer frequency is taxing).
Still not clear if that's the main problem, or it just works around a bigger vmware problem with sound buffers/drivers etc.

Edit: For me, runing WMP (or any app that speeds up the OS timer) on the host resolves the issues in the XP/2003 guests.

 

[Hopachi]

Do you guys, by chance, use overclocking or underclocking of CPU?
Then this can be the reason of the sound issue.

Why it doesn't happen with v7:
-possibly because they changed something about the way frequencies get detected.

For example update for version 8.0.5 adds something to properly detect overclocking to 6000Mhz...
VMware Workstation 8.0.5 Release Notes

Version 9 is not affected by that in particular but I'll see how it goes.

It's just an idea.
I've underclocked (Windows power plan settings) in my case so I'll need to run a test on normal cpu speeds to see how the sound goes.
I'm not sure.

Otherwise, the increased (timer) resolution, that messes sound up, should explain why on version 8 and 9 XP gets slightly better performance, at least from what I've noticed.

 

[tedych]

I do not over/underclock. My power plans are always maximum performance.

I think the more interesting question is why it doesn't happen in virtual Win7/Vistas. It may have something to do with the timer sources. I tried /usepmtimer flag, disabling HPET... etc. At the very last it may really be vmtools fault .
I really want to get things done without any superfluous scripts, processes and such.. and I really doubt vmware would fix this at all.

 

[garycase]

First, I've tried just changing the hardware version number in the .vmx file, and it doesn't work for downgrading the machine. It MAY work if I first uninstalled VMWare tools; then changed the .VMX file; then tried it on an earlier version of VMWare -- I'll add that to my "to do" list But the one time I tried it, the VM wouldn't boot on an earlier version (this may be because of a newer version of VMWare Tools than the old version of VMWare supported).

I agree, however, that the most interesting question is why it's not a problem with Vista or '7 VM's. Another interesting question that I haven't yet checked out is whether this is also an issue with OLDER OS's than XP (i.e. '95, '98, ME, 2000, etc.).

 

[Hopachi]

First, I've tried just changing the hardware version number in the .vmx file, and it doesn't work for downgrading the machine. It MAY work if I first uninstalled VMWare tools; then changed the .VMX file; then tried it on an earlier version of VMWare -- I'll add that to my "to do" list But the one time I tried it, the VM wouldn't boot on an earlier version (this may be because of a newer version of VMWare Tools than the old version of VMWare supported).

I agree, however, that the most interesting question is why it's not a problem with Vista or '7 VM's. Another interesting question that I haven't yet checked out is whether this is also an issue with OLDER OS's than XP (i.e. '95, '98, ME, 2000, etc.).

Sorry, I should have thought about the vm tools earlier. It works without the tools and I've edited the previous post.

I agree with tedych: the driver in the VM tools seems to be the problem: XP and 2000 and 2003 use another driver than the ones below:

Win Vista, 7 and 8 use a newer (intel hd) sound card and are not affected by the issue.

Win95, 98 and ME use another older virtual sound card sound (Soundblaster) and are not affected by sound issues.

I've tested these:
Win95: no sound (see as win98 the site for the driver: not included in VM tools)
Win98: needs the sound driver from creative's site (soundblaster). Look in the VMware user manual for details.
WinME: installed the driver from the ME cd (if not found try creative's driver as above).

One good note: the vm tools for these legacy OSes have less features but work great, even if you have version 9 installed, 95, 98, ME use version 7 as the latest for the tools.

We could try the intel hd sound card in XP (driver need to be added manually) or the older soundblaster if it's still available to see any difference.

 

[tedych]

To summarize my current finginds.

Win2008 x64 host, vmware ws 8.0.3 (there I haven't updated it to 9 yet, but 9 hasn't fixed anything as you know).
-------------------------------------
Default idle timer res = 15ms (15.6 actually) with no VM running.
- Winamp playing on the host => host OS timer = 1ms.
- Winamp playing in XP VM => VM timer = 15.6ms, host timer = 15.6 ms => stuttering sound.
- Winamp playing in XP VM + force host timer 1ms (WMP or timerres executable) => VM timer = 15.6ms, host timer 1ms -> sound is good.
- Winamp playing in Win2008 VM (or Vista) => VM timer = 1ms, host timer = 0.5ms (automatically set by vmware to handle the 1ms request from the VM, with a reserve)

Win7 x64 host, vmware 7.1.4
---------------------------------
- all sounds are good anywhere. The host OS timer is always 1ms (don't know what is forcing it to 1 ms all the time, maybe the java based UPS monitoring software I have, I'll turn it off to check)
- XP VM playing sound => VM timer = 15.6 ms.
- Win7 VM playing sound => VM timer = 1ms.

It seems Vista+ set their timer to 1 ms no matter the player. XP doesn't touch the timer, except for when WMP or other player/program requests timer boost. This theory however has its flaw - why vmware 8 on Win2008 host doesn't set the timer to 1ms when it plays a sound (from the VM) through the *host's* sound card.. so the bottom line again - vmware should fix this .
It always boils down to the host timer - no matter the VM timer, when the host is 1ms, sound is fine.

Edit: I should have mentioned that I've tried the different possible soundcard types in the vmx config. Currently for XP I think it was ES1371 or something like that (ensoniq sound blaster?!).
Also, for Win2003 guests there is no sound driver as well, so I had to download a creative driver and install it, so it isn't from vmtools, and the sound is the same - bad.

 

[Hopachi]

Win2008 x64 host, vmware ws 8.0.3 (there I haven't updated it to 9 yet, but 9 hasn't fixed anything as you know).

Alright.

If you're really interested about version 8 use 8.0.5 to see.
How do you test that out on a version we know it got older with issues... that's why they made 8.0.5. It's a free update if you already have 8.

Also please look a my previous post if you're interested in the different sound drivers available for VM's.

I'm on Player 5.0.1 and that is identical to Workstation 9.0.1 so I'll tell you anything I find here.

Thanks
Hopachi

 

[tedych]

Hopachi, see my edit above .
As to vmw 8, I just haven't updated there, but I have and tried vmware 9.0.1 on a Win2003 host. It behaves the same.
I'll try it on the Win2008 host now anyway. It is a too-long-lasting issue and I'll give this a shot now, as the last thing I'll try because I lost too much time on this already.
I'm not interested in 8.0.5, we are on the 9.x branch already . If 9 (last version) hasn't fixed it, no reason to think 8 would have.

Edit: just updated to 9.0.1 on Win2008 host. Absolutely nothing has changed . How could I even think it would be different.