Brad Wilson - The .NET Guy

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Virtual PC, Windows Server 2003, and Sound

I did manage to get sound working in a Virtual PC image of Windows Server 2003, but only after a fashion. The drivers are installed, and it does make sound, but quite badly. Playing back MP3/WMA files is out of the question, because it's apparently CPU starved or data starved or something, causing the sound to go staticy and slow down.

However, even if I never get it to play music happily, at least I will have killed that nasty emulated PC beep. :)

I took the suggestion of others and scoured around in the Windows XP CD image to find what I needed, which I'm listing here. Some files will be compressed and need to be expanded with EXPAND.EXE (e.g., wdmaudio.inf is in \I386\WDMAUDIO.IN_). Some files will be sitting in DRIVERS.CAB. I'd post a ZIP here of everything you need, but I don't think Microsoft would be overly pleased with me.

File list:

08/17/2001 12:19 6,912 ctlfacem.sys
08/17/2001 12:19 3,712 ctljystk.sys
08/17/2001 12:19 96,256 ctlsb16.sys
08/17/2001 22:36 4,096 ctwdm32.dll
08/17/2001 12:03 37,741 ks.inf
08/17/2001 11:56 40,466 wdma_ctl.inf
08/17/2001 22:37 22,016 wdmaud.drv
08/17/2001 22:24 79,616 wdmaud.sys
08/17/2001 11:55 23,685 wdmaudio.inf

Enjoy!

Update: When I run the VPC on my desktop machine, the sound is fine; it's only on my laptop that the problems seem to exist, which is no shock given what a slouch my laptop is. I even just tested a full re-compile while listening to music, and no hiccups.

Update #2: Peter Provost adds a rumor that VPC 2004 SP1 will include two cool features: USB support (the only major thing missing when comparing VMware to VPC), and an updated virtualized sound card, something that doesn't suck so bad as a virtual ISA Soundblaster 16, apparently. Let's hope it's true!

posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 7:15 AM