Good Sounding Virtual Desktops

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You’re prepping an image for use with a VMware Horizon deployment. You get all your applications tweaked and life is good. You optimized your image with the VMware OS Optimization Tool Fling. You go and test it, it appears to work great. On to the next task, oh wait you didn’t hear the familiar sound of logging in or out of the virtual desktop.

You check the speakers are hooked up. The sound on your system isn’t muted… what the heck?

speaker with sound bars and a no symbol across itI ran into this during a POC this last week. Here’s my quick tips on addressing this issue…

Start out validating that it’s not an ID:10t error and the speakers aren’t muted.

Then its time to check the registry. If you aren’t versed in working in the registry you probably shouldn’t be mucking around in it. If you are familiar with the registry visit the VMware KB 1004839 on enabling sound for RDP.

Find your OS in the list and follow the instructions for enabling the audio/video playback redirection.

It’s worth noting that the guide says its for RDP based connections. From my experience this also works for PCoIP connections as well.

This works great, you hear sound and life is good… Till those pesky end users start complaining that the sound and video is off when they watch their favorite Youtube clips. Now what?

Have no fear, there’s a solution for that.

Teradici has a virtual audio driver for PCoIP. It’s actually harder to login than it is to install. Download the driver, unzip it, and follow the instructions to install it.

When you test you should have sound that’s in sync with your video and your user’s can return to their regularly scheduled cat videos. You’re their IT hero.

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