CTX124137 – Audio Quality Sounds Distorted or Choppy – Citrix Knowledge Center

Symptoms

When connecting through an ICA session, audio output sounds distorted or choppy. RDP sessions do not exhibit this same distorted audio output.

Summary

This document provides step by step instructions to configure audio for the highest possible quality through an ICA session.

Background

The quality of audio that each session receives depends as much on the network connection as it does on the XenApp environment configuration.

There a few different options for configuring audio bandwidth limits in your session and each of these settings plays an important role in the actual audio output quality that your users hear.

There are three audio quality options (High, Medium, and Low) that can be configured for any ICA session, and each setting sets a determined amount of bandwidth for the audio throughput within the session.

Below is a list of the audio quality limits available with respect to bandwidth:

0 – High – 1.4 megabits per second (Mbps)
1 – Medium – 64 kilobits per second (Kbps)
2 – Low – 4 Kbps

The default audio quality for any XenApp server is set to medium quality, which could limit the audio stream and affect the actual audio output sound.

Setting the audio quality option to High increases the bandwidth and should give you the best audio quality possible for your ICA session.

Resolution

There are several different places you can configure the audio quality options for your ICA sessions, see below for instructions and explanations for each.

ICA Listener:

By default, the server is set to medium audio quality on the ICA listener. Unless this is changed, there is no way to get the high audio quality no matter what other options you configure.

1. In the ICA-TCP Listener, from the ICA Setting tab, click on the Client Audio Quality drop down button and scroll to the option for High audio quality.
2. Click Apply to save this setting.

Citrix Audio Policy:

The Citrix policy for audio is for specifically setting a lower audio quality than the server default value. So, if you have the server set to high audio and you have a group of users that do not require this much bandwidth for audio, then you would create an Audio policy restricting this group of users.

In the XenApp Advanced Configuration console (formerly known as Presentation Server Console), from the Policy tab, create a policy for specifically restricting users from not getting the default audio quality as set forth by the ICA-TCP configuration.

Full Program Neighborhood Client:

For any user to get high audio quality when using the Full PN Client, they must manually adjust their client properties. This adjustment is because the client’s default setting is set to Sound Server Default which is always Medium audio quality.

1. From the full Program Neighborhood client, click on the application set or the custom ICA connection you wish to use and select Settings,
2. Click on the Default Options tab. You should see the Sound Options.
3. Uncheck the Sound Server Default check box, and then select the Enable Sound check box.
4. From the drop down, select the High Sound Quality and click OK to save your settings.

Online Plug-in (Program Neighborhood Agent):

To give users the ability to choose High Audio Quality you must set this in the Program Neighborhood Agent site on the Web Interface Server.

1. Navigate to the Access Management Console > Program Neighborhood Agent site in the and select the Config.xml file for the Program Neighborhood Agent site your users are configured to use.
2. Click on the Change Session Options in the common tasks pane.

1. Verify that the High Quality audio option is selected.

The custom settings above give your users the ability to manage their Online Plug-in audio quality options.

1. From the Online Plug-in client, right-click and select Options.
2. From the Session Options tab you can manually configure the audio quality by clicking the drop down and selecting High Quality audio.

Note: The options available here depend on the options you selected above in the config.xml file.

Web Interface:

By default, the audio quality in Web Interface is set to No Preference, which defaults to the server specification medium audio quality. One way to give a user the ability to change this is to configure the Web Interface site to allow users to customize audio quality.

For more information on this, refer to: CTX120587 – How to Improve Sound Quality in Web Interface

More Information

CTX104737 – How to Test the Audio Input and Audio Security Policy
CTX443787 – Troubleshooting ICA Client Audio Issues

This document applies to:

• Feature Pack 1 for Presentation Server 4.5
• Presentation Server 4.5 for Windows Server 2003
• Presentation Server 4.5 for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition
• XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2003 x64
• XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2003 x86
• XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2008 x64
• XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2008 x86

Source: CTX124137 – Audio Quality Sounds Distorted or Choppy – Citrix Knowledge Center