[linux-audio-user] Re: VMWare for Music

[Alexandre DENIS]

ross at jose.lug.udel.edu wrote:

>On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 01:59:19PM +0300, David Baron wrote:
>  
>
>>There are some alternatives, none of which I have ventured to try:
>>qemo - open source
>>zen - open source
>>Lin4win - less expensive than vmware but restricted to i386.
>>    
>>
>
>Thanks!  I'll look into the alternatives.  Unfortuantely, I'm fairly
>sure that Xen requires client OS support, so Windows is probably a
>no-go.  But I had forgotten all about Lin4Win.  Does anyone have
>promising reports on that?
>  
>
I had a similar problem to run my favorite Windows apps (SONAR and 
Rebirth) on Linux. Wine doesn't work at all for SONAR, and Cakewalk 
developers are not going to work in this direction. Most open source 
virtual machines are Linux-only and do not support Windows as guest OS 
(Xen, plex86, ...). The results with Qemu were not good at all -- very 
bad performance in fact. The best result I have got is with VMWare.

Actually, I am able to run SONAR very well in VMWare: no dropout, 
adequate performance (you won't get the same track count as with native 
Windows, though). This is the only working solution I found. However, 
the audio support in VMWare is minimalistic: no MIDI and emulated audio 
I/O is a SB16 PCI (one stereo pair, 16 bits, 44.1kHz -- no 24/96, no 
multi-I/O, but there are WDM drivers).

I tried various solution for MIDI. Bad results with OSC/UDP (bad timing, 
too much jitter). Bad results with KeyKit. Finally, I found a much 
better (no network) MIDI solution: I install a MIDI/serial driver in 
Windows, I configure a serial/named pipe in VMWare, and I wrote a small 
named-pipe-to-alsa bridge; this solution works, good timing, low jitter. 
The only drawback is that I get only one MIDI port (the Roland 
MIDI/serial driver I use doesn't support multiple ports), but I guess I 
may find another driver that supports multiple ports.

You can download a demo of VMWare and make yourself your opinion about 
its use for audio. I will release shortly my MIDI bridge. I am even 
considering writing a Jack backend for VMWareDSP, but don't hold your 
breath for it.

Hope it helps.

-a.