Broken Audio When Parallels 17 in Background

A

Anthony Mattas

Bit poster
When Parallels 17.0.1 (51482) is in the background, my audio gets really choppy. Specifically if I'm on a teams call, with my USB headset connected to the guest VM I have a hard time with the conversation.

The host machine is running MacOS 11.5.2

This seemed to start around the time I upgraded to Parallels 17 from Parallels 16
 
Similar experience with me when using Windows 11 guest host. The audio is keeps cut in & out from both sides of hosts a physical and guest host. The cherry on top is when playing audio from physical host using Airplay to HomePod mini for audio purpose and using guest host (Win 11) as main usage, the Airplay audio will create so much latency, it will disconnect automatically from AirPlay audio to speaker audio. + This issue started after upgrading to Parallels 17, the overall experience is just not up to par. Parallels 17 is not stable enough for Big Sur and mainly for Windows guest host machine.
 
Thanks Anthony for feedback. I have played around with the hypervisor options, and I came to find out is that turning off "Adaptive Hypervisor" running on Apple hypervisor, does improve the performance but not to extend to use like guest OS running on physical hardware. Further testing, I have switch from Apple hypervisor to Parallels hypervisor with VM configure for Gaming instead of productivity , that actually for my particular experience, the guest OS "Windows 11" feels very snappy and drastically improve performance. With this particular setup, it mess up the sound on Mac and with guest os "Windows 11". What I mean is when I tried to play any sort of sound on mac, it doesn't seems to play but instead it continues to buffer but sometimes if the sounds does play and when I switched to VM, it cuts the audio of mac with guest os audio doesn't play anything. After couples tries like restarting the vm and mac, the audio issue doesn't seems to fix it. Later, when I change the VM configure to Productivity, the audio problem comes back and when using VM, I'm not getting any sort of audio jankky or broken audio either from Mac or guest os. After configuring the VM to Productivity, the performance does seems to drop and doesn't feel like when its on Gaming configure and huge sacrifice on battery performance.
From this testing, Parallels should have idea which area to focus improving the experience. Also, one big issue I'm having with Windows 11 is that for some reason my particular setup doesn't seems to get any Windows Updates. I'm part of Windows Insider Program, running beta channel of Windows 11 in Parallels VM on macOS Big Sur. I've activate the Windows 11 with genuine key but not receiving any updates expect for some security updates but no Insider updates.
 
I actually take my word back about audio issue. The audio issue is still present even despite after changing the VM hypervisor. This is most likely is a bug where the sound from mac suddenly stopped after switched to Windows 11 VM and playing something on VM. I've uploaded a short video of showing the bug/glitch and screenshot of VM configuration.
Link to video: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0CL4JkIJgNghAso3ydNkUo7Uw#IMG_0799
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2021-09-17 at 4.08.07 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2021-09-17 at 4.08.07 PM.png
    446.6 KB · Views: 19
  • Screen Shot 2021-09-17 at 4.07.58 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2021-09-17 at 4.07.58 PM.png
    486 KB · Views: 20
  • Screen Shot 2021-09-17 at 4.07.50 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2021-09-17 at 4.07.50 PM.png
    544.4 KB · Views: 21
Same situation here. I updated Parallels from version 16 to 17.0.0 and my headphones were cut from the anv vm host ... I went back to version 16.5.1 and things are back to normal. Today I tried version 17.0.1 but the sound problems still occurs ....
 
I'm having similar intermittent experiences. Sometimes the audio just stops working on mac, and won't come back until I stop the virtual machine. I've had this with both Win 10 and Win 11 guests. I will test with 7 and 8.1.

I've only had it when running 2 VMs at the same time. I have my main Win 10 guest OS for development, and another VM running for testing purposes when needed. And it's always the 2nd testing VM that appears to be problematic for me.

I did have my hands burned upgrading from 15 to 16 on an older mac. Curious if people on newer macs are having this issue. I've a mid 2014 macbook pro.

Happy to provide any required logs, if someone can tell me what would be helpful. I've had a look through parallels.log within the .pvm, looking at timestamps when the audio failed, but didn't spot anything obvious...
 
This might help someone else out.
As above, 2VMs running, a development VM and a test VM.
Both have the sound set to the default option under the hardware settings.
I had a browser tab open listening to the radio on my mac host. Starting that 2nd test VM while my dev VM was already running killed the sound on my host mac. Not always immediately, but it does kill it.
I had a UAC prompt with the notification sound within my test VM play, that made my radio return (still streaming) for 5 seconds or so, before becoming silent once more. I repeated this several times.
I decided to look at the sound settings for my test VM, and changed it from default to disabled. I no longer have sound issues on my mac host. Must be a parallels 17 issue... never had this problem on parallels 16.
I appreciate this solution may not be suitable for everyone, but fine for what I'm trying to do.
 
Darren4 said:
This might help someone else out.
As above, 2VMs running, a development VM and a test VM.
Both have the sound set to the default option under the hardware settings.
I had a browser tab open listening to the radio on my mac host. Starting that 2nd test VM while my dev VM was already running killed the sound on my host mac. Not always immediately, but it does kill it.
I had a UAC prompt with the notification sound within my test VM play, that made my radio return (still streaming) for 5 seconds or so, before becoming silent once more. I repeated this several times.
I decided to look at the sound settings for my test VM, and changed it from default to disabled. I no longer have sound issues on my mac host. Must be a parallels 17 issue... never had this problem on parallels 16.
I appreciate this solution may not be suitable for everyone, but fine for what I'm trying to do.
Click to expand...

Doing this means sound is disabled inside VM right?
 
AlexA2 said:
Doing this means sound is disabled inside VM right?
Click to expand...
It will be disabled in the VM, which wasn't an issue for my specific scenario. It's probably not suitable for what most people are trying to do, but it might help someone else out.
 
For what it's worth, I upgraded my mac last week. I no longer have this issue on Parallels 17. Perhaps it's model dependent. When upgrading to Parallels 16, I experienced an issue which was CPU dependent which affected older macs (mine was a 15" mid 2014 macbook pro). My new machine is a 16" mid 2019 macbook pro which doesn't have this problem.
 
I have this problem also with Parallels 17.1.1 and Windows 11 guest on a new M1 Pro.
Sound is choppy and glitchy when Parallels is in the background, much more stable when in the foreground. It can still be glitchy even then though.
The host is not running low on any resources (I have 32GB of RAM!) but it does seem to be affected by things like opening new tabs in the browser (on the host) etc.
Would love to see a fix...
 
Useless fix for most probably. but I found that by switching the Sound Output to my actual soundcard rather than the OS Default, the glitches are mostly killed off. I get them switching apps or other things occasionally.
I haven't tried yet, but it may work for the Line Out or MacBook Pro Speakers as well if you're using them?
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2021-12-15 at 10.39.55 pm.png
    Screen Shot 2021-12-15 at 10.39.55 pm.png
    40.6 KB · Views: 33
After downgrading to PD16, I've not had this issue. Afraid to go back to PD17 unless it's confirmed that the latest revision of that fixes the broken audio.
 
I also have an issue with the audio when running Parallels 17 (with Windows 10). It seems to happen randomly, suddently the sound just turns off. I can turn it on again as soon as I have closed Parallels, so it definitely seems like a Parallels issue. This means I keep turning on and off Parallels many, many times a day...
 
Upgraded Mac OS and Parallels to version 17 and ran into the audio issue cutting out on the Mac despite trying a variety of sound and USB configurations. Once I downgraded to version 16 my issues went away. I'm on a MBP 16-inch 2019 Intel Core i7.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top