For those who have installed Ubuntu 14.04 in a VMware VM in W8.1 as the host and has received this "A device ID has been used that is out of range for your system" their is a fix. After ticking everything I knew and uninstalling and reinstalling the audio driver, I finally decided to install a dedicated sound card I had. In my case that was a C-Media sound card installed with the W7 driver and bingo it worked. Don't know why their is a lack of communication between the onboard sound and VMware.