Quest vWorkspace 7.0 Feature Spotlight: Enhanced Bi-Directional Audio

Today we will be looking into the improvements that were made in vWorkspace with regard to its audio capabilities. With Quest vWorkspace 7.0 the bi-directional audio capabilities have been enhanced to provide for better sound quality while using less bandwidth.

For a long time now vWorkspace has extended to RDP protocol to provide bi-directional audio. Quest extended the RDP protocol because native RDP just provided downstream audio meaning you could for example have sounds from a Terminal Server / RD Session Host session play on your client device (”the you-have-new-mail-sound”) while Quest vWorkspace provided upstream audio, meaning you could use microphones and other audio input devices in a vWorkspace session.

From the configuration page of a device that has the vWorkspace client installed, it looks like this:

When you enable the new bi-directional capabilities of Quest vWorkspace 7.0 a new audio codec is used for both the upstream and downstream audio. This results in less bandwidth being used while the sound quality increases. This is extremely useful for customers that connect to the datacenter over a shared (WAN) connection. An example of the bandwidth savings: ( for obvious reasons you will just have to take our word for the enhanced audio quality )

This screenshot shows a real-time bandwidth meter that is monitoring two concurrent vWorkspace sessions. The top one ( Process 6516) is utilizing the enhanced bi-directional audio capabilities of vWorkspace where the lower session (Process 3580) is using the native RDP audio redirection. The bandwidth is measure in kilobits per second (kbps) and as you can see, the enhanced bi-directional audio capabilities of vWorkspace use about a third of the bandwidth that native RDP audio redirection while delivering higher sound quality. These tests were done with the “CD Quality” configuration setting (see first screenshot). Most usage cases could do with lower quality settings which would create even more bandwidth savings.

In addition, the enhancements to vWorkspace bi-directional audio allow the audio quality settings to be configured in details to provide the optimal mix between audio quality and bandwidth usage. There’s even the possibility to configure the network buffering to allow for flawless playback of extended audio fragments (like MP3s). Finally the usage of upstream audio (a microphone for example) can be fine-tuned as well by provided the desired quality and complexity details.

All these enhancements to the bi-directional feature of Quest vWorkspace 7.0 allows customers to achieve a rich audio experience in any vWorkspace in using complex device configurations and even when using a bandwidth constraint connection.

This is just another example of the many unique features of Quest EOP that extend RDP into a protocol that delivers a great user experience, regardless if it is LAN or WAN.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.