Rudd-O.com

VMware (Workstation or Player) under Linux tends to stutter and produce choppy audio when running a Windows XP virtual machine. Here’s what I did to kill those problems (yes, I can even use Steinberg Nuendo now!):

1. Open the VMware .vmx / .cfg file of your VM.
   1. Find the config entries labeled sound. Kill them all.
   2. Put the following instead:

      sound.present = "TRUE"
      sound.autodetect = "TRUE"
      sound.fileName = "-1"
      sound.directSound = "false"
      sound.highPriority = "TRUE"
      sound.maxLength = 2048
      sound.smallBlockSize = 1024

2. If you are using Steinberg Nuendo in your VM:
   1. Go to Devices -> Device configuration…
   2. Select VST Multitrack on the left panel.
   3. Change the ASIO controller to ASIO DirectX Full Duplex

Let’s hope this works for you as well as it worked for me. Here’s the obligatory screenshot:

See that? It’s Steinberg Nuendo performing a mix down under Windows XP, running under a VMware machine in a headless Linux computer, displaying to a virtual Xrealvnc screen, displayed on my desktop computer using KRDC (my favorite VNC client). KRDC is set to resize the desktop — that’s why Windows looks a bit blurry. For kicks, XMMS is playing the mix down as it’s being generated, from a shared folder in the Windows virtual machine.

Refer to my previous “cluster computing” audio hack to understand why I went to such lengths.

It’s a 3-hour mix, so the mix down will take a while. I’l just sit and chill.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 8:58 and is filed under Linux, MP3/música, Tips, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.