USB soundcard passthrough for VMWARE

[FishThrower]

Hi all,
can anyone recommend me a USB soundcard that is compatible with VMWARE as a pass-through device?

I have basically got a HP Microserver running ESXi 5.0, and I would like to install ITunes \ Media Center on a VM, and then control my music collection from my IPAD using Apple Remote to play music through my stereo.

Reason why I am running VMWARE is that I have some test VMs that I use to play around with.

On a side note... do people still bother with media servers anymore at home? or have people moved onto Spotify Premium etc?

thanks in advance.

 

[marc2003]

i can't imagine why you'd have any problems with a particular USB device over another. it might be worth checking over this page though.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1022290

 

[IanPowell]

Did you get this working

Hi,

I recently bought an HP Microserver N54L, a usb soundcard (Creative Soundblaster X-Fi) and 16Gb RAM. I have configured ESXi (bare metal) to support virtual machines which run fine.

I also wanted to create a windows virtual machine to act solely as a media player (connected via the soundcard to the Hifi system) running iTunes.

I can pass the usb port through to the virtual machine and all seems to work except the sound quality is not perfect. More often during music playback I get stutter and popping sound (I have checked the wiring). The soundcard works perfectly when directly connected to another machine.

The virtual machine OS's tried are Windows 2008, Windows Home Server 2011.

I was wondering what experiences you also had had.