Windows 11 Arm sound driver and audio latency

[Jimmy5]

Hi all. Got a question about sound driver and audio latency please. Your help greatly greatly appreciated.

Because I'm totally blind using a screen reader to interact and control the device, any latency at all is a mark down to efficiency.

On my 10 year old Mac Air, I used a bare bone Win 8.1 version beside reverting to using an older VMWare audio driver es1371, which provided really snappy and smooth audio response.

I found the instruction here. It basically involves extracting the older driver meant to be used on Windows Vista, installing on the VM, and fixing the .vmx config file to do two things: 1) forced-use the es1371 (instead of the newer HDAudio), and 2) set the buffer time to 30, presumably ms (with an added line of code of “pciSound.playBuffer = "30"”.

However, as it’s time for me to update to newer Mac, I chose an Apple Silicon which is no hope running Intel versions. I have no idea how to fix it now as I’m totally a newbie in this. No matter what I tried, it didn’t help:

1. I tried forcing VMWare to use es1371. I had no problem installing it, but after I shut down the VM and changed the .vmx config file, the VM went totally silent, which is no different to a dead black screen to you guys . When I used my phone to read the screen content, I believe it said VMWare 13 no longer supports this driver.

2. I also tried adding the PCISound to adjust buffer time without forcing VMWare to switch away from the HDAudio driver. It ended up crashing the VM. It says something like the VMX config has been altered; VMWare auto repair failed…

Nothing I did could recover the machine afterwards. Nor did it help even when I used the .VMWareVM duplicate I created before both installing the older driver and changing the .VMX file. The whole thing forced me to have to reinstall Windows so many times last couple of days .

 

Any suggestion at all is greatly greatly appreciated.

Thanks all, and sorry for such a long post .

[ColoradoMarmot]

Unfortunately, it's highly unlikely you'll be able to use that old driver - it's ancient for Windows 11 and is also intel based, which probably won't work on ARM.

I presume that what you're trying to do is install a driver inside the VM, but are using a screen reader on the host mac.  I would guess that there isn't a solution that will work on ARM machines (at least not yet).  The best option would be to install a dedicated screen reader inside the guest and somehow switch between the two readers.

[Jimmy5]

Thanks so much for your prompt reply.
No actually I'm using two screen readers at the same time, Voice Over on the Mac host, and NVDA on the VM. When the I interact with the host side, Voice Over will read and vice versa.
The problem is that when I'm interacting on the VM side, it has quite a lag for NVDA to respond after I press a key or a command for instance.
If you know how to change the buffer size / time for the newer HDAudio for example, please show me as it might help.

Best,

[ColoradoMarmot]

I'm afraid I don't, but that might be due to the limitations in the current VMWare tools for Windows ARM.  They're pretty rudimentary, and the audio one in particular had issues during the tech preview.  if that's the case, things should get much better now that there's official support from Microsoft for Windows on Macs, and with VMWare's commitment to reaching - and surpassing - the competition.  I know some of the folks on the Fusion team, and have high confidence that now that the legal issues are past, that we'll see major improvement.

That's a long way of saying, the best path may be just to wait a bit.

[Memnarch]

Any update on this? I'm having marked audio  stutter with the 2023 tech preview and win 11 insider edition.

[VMware Community Member]

I'm also wondering if there are any updates on this since it's now 2024? I've attempted to fix this myself, but it seems like pciSound.playBuffer doesn't fix the delay, and using es1371 is impossible as VMWare Fusion doesn't support it anymore. The only solution that works is to pass through a USB audio interface, but that's obviously not ideal.

[ColoradoMarmot]

All the latency I experienced in the TP is gone in 13.5, fwiw.

[johnfreeman]

I wasn't notified of this reply, but I just found this thread again and wanted to mention that I'm on 13.5.2 (23775688) and I still experience audio latency, 125ms to be precise as I've measured via frame count from an iPhone 240FPS recording. The VMWare tools and the Windows 11 ARM install are both up to date, and the host is Sonoma 14.5.

[Technogeezer]

I suspect Fusion's virtual audio device has the latency issues. Windows uses a Microsoft-provided device driver for the high res audio device presented to the VM on Windows 11 ARM. VMware Tools doesn't provide the audio driver. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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