Friday, March 30, 2007

How to get sound working on Virtual PC 2007 with Vista guest OS

Virtual PC 2007 added a new sound system specifically for using Vista as a guest and host OS.  But when you install Vista as a guest OS, there is no sound!  A search on Google and Live Search didn't turn up anything about how to use it. 

Eventually I found that after you install the VM Additions, the sound driver is silently copied into the guest OS's "C:\Program Files\Virtual Machine Additions" folder.  All you need to do to get sound working is "update" your audio controller driver within your Vista guest OS and tell it you Have Disk... and point it at that folder and voila!  Beautiful sound.  (without any restarts either).

17 comments:

Artur said...

Very good advice. Thanks

Anonymous said...

too many instructions, just install (or update) your VM Additions and you have sound.

Anonymous said...

I installed VM Additions and the sound didn't automatically work after rebooting like it said to.

I followed the directions here and now I have a "Microsoft Virtual Machine Audio Device Driver."

Thank you for sharing this tip for when it doesn't work automagically.

Anonymous said...

it worked. I need custome resolution in Vista on MSVM

Anonymous said...

It worled. I need Custome Resolution on Virtual PC with Nvdia 7300 Card. Power Strip ...
Can you help here too ...???

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much. That did it for me as well. I had search around a bit for the files.

Thanks

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much. I have spent hours trying to get the sound working on my Vista Guest OS and your steps worked perfectly!

Clay said...

Thanks! Yours was the only solution I found.

BTW, you might add the error message as a keyword or text on your page, just in case someone is smart enough to search on that:

I first tried searching on:
Vista
"virtual pc"
"no audio device installed"

info said...

thanks mate, tried several crap advices, this one was the only right thing

Vik said...

Hi!

I have automated some audio testing on a real machine by connecting the mic to the earphones port on my desktop and cathing the sound via the mic device in .NET.

How do I do the same when I am using a virtual machine for my testing on a blade server or a common VM server? Can you please help me?

taxidriver05 said...

Well...

It is good to know, how to get sound running on Vista as guest OS.

But ist there also a possibility to get sound running on windows 7 Beta?

If it's possible, please let me know.

simis said...

Thank you very much.
Finally I have sound in Win 7, yes it works for Win 7 to :)

Dan Parker said...

Thanks for posting this! I needed it for the Windows 7 beta install!!

Neal said...

Andrew you beauty. Worked a treat for me with Windows7RC guest on an XP Pro SP3 host.

hello said...

best advice I've ever gotten on one of these searches. Right to the point, without too many pronouns confusing everyone. Can you please update all the Microsoft Documentation now? Thanks.

Fossy said...

This did work for me but it stopped my dynamic screen resolution working, and I want that more, (allow any screen resolution)

Kreera said...

Excellent advice. Thanks! One thing I ran into though, was that the Device Manager in the VM failed to show any sound controller at all, so I couldn't update the driver at first. To make it appear, I had to first disable sound in the VM settings, restart the VM, then re-enable sound, before the sound controller became visible and I could do the driver update. Perhaps this was caused by the VM having been created before I updated VPC to SP1?