Host: Mandriva 2007, Guest: Windows 2000 Notebooks with sound system based in onboard Intel HD Audio like Toshiba Satellite A105 series, has the sound in a W2K Parallels virtual machine detected as an 82801 BA/BAM AC'97 Audio Controller and install the driver version 5.00.2160.1 from march 2000. This driver is very bad. Sound is horrible with mp3 files and you get a lot of "error writing to /dev/dsp! Using loopback device instead". Solution: Install Realtek AC'97 Audio version 5.10.00.5420 or newer.
. It would be nice to be able to post that in the howto forum, but it's so cluttered with mac user questions, it would be lost much too quickly. Sigh. .
Sound card inside guest operation system is not like sound card on host. And i can suggest that guest sound card is not responsible for bad sound. Try to disable applications that are using your host sound card. /dev/dsp errors can occur, when VM tries to open sound device, but can't do it because sound device is used by other application. Of course, we will work to support more complex sound emulation, i saw it in our plans some time ago.
Ynot, I have to disagree about that. With WinXP as a guest in this same host the sound driver automatically detected and installed works nice and the same not happen with Win2k as I have explained. /dev/dsp errors occur because parallels sometimes try to access the sound device when it is still being used by artsd (linux and KDE in the case). By the way, does Parallels support or not sound output to artsd, esd or another sound daemon? I've already done this question and no response from Parallels team until now. Even the User Manual are not clear about that.
