Terminal Services Bad Audio / Sound

[kesomir]

I've never had luck with audio redirection and vanilla terminal services on server 2003.

 

High Latency (not synced with app) and sometimes choppy sound. I remember reading that this was a known issue - sound is just cack with MSTS (unlike super duper LTSP).

 

Is there a fix that anyone knows? Or are the third part tools (Citrix, 2X) better in this regard (ie: sound like the audio is playing on the TC / up to fat client standard)?

 

I currently have audio redirection turned off because it's not useable imo.

[ssiruuk2]

Definately sounds like you have something causing a bottleneck. We use sound ok with our thin clients on our network - its disabled for our remote users though working from home as the bandwidth issues make the sound very choppy. At LAN speeds it should work fine - we can run streaming internet radio over it no problem and the kids use basic programs like WordShark fine (SEN program that speaks words on screen etc) - in full class sets.

 

2x products wont help with this as it still depends upon the capability of MS RDP protocol - Citrix on the other hand is using its own ICA protocol. I wouldn't be suprised if ICA is alot better at handling audio but we just use a small server farm of 2003 terminal servers and a 2x load balancer to distribute the client connections. So in theory our performace should be worse as all the RDP traffic goes through the mid to low spec 2x server instead of going straight to the thin client in a typical setup.

 

Are your thin clients on the same vlan as all your other machines maybe you have alot of broadcasting or file transfer traffic that is causing problems? What spec is your terminal server(s) and network infrastructure between the TS and your thin clients?

 

By the way - we are a vanilla Server 2003 network also.

Edited July 22, 2008 by ssiruuk2
multiple typos!

[Ric_]

Citrix rocks at this... it uses one of its SpeedScreen technologies to actually have the client play the audio rather than the server (if you understand what I mean). The only 'problem' is that there is a delay in pressing the stop button in a media player to the sound actually stopping - a known issue.

 

It does sound like you have bandwidth issues though... of course the ICA client is a lot slimmer so that might help you there too.