A while ago I blogged about sound problem on Gentoo in VMWare. You can read about it here – Gentoo Problems with Sound.

As it turns out, it was an issue with the in-kernel sound driver for the soundcard that vmplayer emulates. If you’re using kernel 2.6.30-r6 or older, it should work fine. But if you update to a later kernel, it will plays the audio messed up. Solution? Well you could do:

  1. Compile kernel without sound driver, then find the driver independently and use a version that works.
  2. Rollback to 2.6.30-r6 or older.

For compiling kernel without sound driver, it will be a bit of work to find which driver it uses for emulated vmplayer soundcard. lspci on my vmplayer 3 reports:

00:12.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 02)

If you can find in the kernel the modules and disable it and then either find the driver binary for your distro or find the source, then you can roll back to a version that works. Keep in mind that it could be some kernel setting that is causing the audio to be played badly. Some realtime or clock settings.

For #2, most distros are on old kernels so it should be fine. By the time more distros move to the newer kernel, it could get fixed in the kernel or a better solution may be blogged about.

Until then, enjoy your linux distro.