Sound not running in Alpha 3 under VMWare Player

Hi,

I am running Alpha 3 under VMWare player and the sound doesn’t work. I downloaded an .mp3 file and tried playing it under MediaPlayer. The volume meters on the MediaPlayer respond to the song being played, but no sound comes out. System sounds also don’t work.

When I click on the speaker icon on the Tracker, it responds “Could not find the mixer”.

In the Media Settings panel, under Audio Settings, under Defaults, Audio Output, it says “none”, and when I click on it, it says “empty”.

In the Media Settings Panel, under Audio Mixer, Gain Controls, it says “Master Output not connected”.

What to do? Thank you for any help!

bye,
William

So I guess the problem is an incompatible sound card on my host computer?

I had the same thing happen to me with a different computer. My sound sound card wasn’t in the compatibility list either so I’m pretty sure that it is an incompatible sound card. As for the “mixer not found” issue, I’m guessing it might be because the audio server returns an error to the app when it tries to register the mixer. (I know nothing of the audio server so this is just a guess)

I am running VMWare player on a Dell, Windows 7 laptop with “Realtek High Definition Audio”. I didn’t see any Realtek sound cards on the hardware compatibility list – is that the problem? But then why does the error message I get say it “Could not find the mixer”? Isn’t the missing mixer separate form the sound card issue?

Thanks for the info kidd106…

I finally got my sound to work in VMWare Player in R1 Alpha3, so I will relate how I did it.

  1. Open a terminal and type installoptionalpackage OpenSound. Wait for it to install.

  2. Remove (or rename to “old-hda”) the hda audio driver. On my system this was in: /boot/system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin. Also remove the link to the hda driver in /boot/system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/dev/audio/hmulti.

  3. If you are running R1 Alpha3 in VMWare Player, find the “haiku-r1alpha3.vmx” file – you will be adding some lines to it. First I had to comment out the line “sound.present=false” by putting a # in front of it. Next I added the following lines to the .vmx file:

sound.present = "true"
sound.autodetect = "FALSE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
sound.fileName = "Speakers (Realtek High Definiti"
sound.startConnected = “true”

Maybe download a .vmx file for a Linux distro where the sound works and get the values for “sound.virtualDev” and “sound.filename” from that for your computer.

OK, I hope maybe this will give someone else some clues for getting their sound to work – good luck!

To be on the safe side you need to rename hda before installing oss. Also you don’t need to rename the symlink as it will be broken anyway after hda renaming. So everything you need to do is:

mv /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin/hda /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin/hda.disabled
installoptionalpackage opensound

Are you sure about:

sound.fileName = "Speakers (Realtek High Definiti"

Looks like it is cut off in the middle.

I looked at the “Speakers (Realtek High Definiti” which is cut off, but that is the way it’s listed in my .vmx file and sound works. Hmmm…

I renamed the hda driver file and installed OpenSound first, but still my sound wouldn’t run under VmWare; I needed to edit the .vmx file to get sound running – is this normal?

Yes, you need to tell vmware which sound card to emulate, so yes.
When our hda driver support this es1371 variant OSS shouldn’t be needed anymore.