How to Enable and Manage Client Audio Settings for the Citrix Receiver using a Group Policy

How to Enable and Manage Client Audio Settings for the Citrix Receiver using a Group Policy

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Article ID: CTX121613

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Description

This article is intended for Citrix administrators and technical teams only. Non-admin users must contact their company’s Help Desk/IT support team and can refer to CTX297149 for more information.


This article explains Citrix Administrators how to configure the different audio options for Citrix Receiver using the icaclient.adm template (GPO).

Background

This policy allows for the configuration of client audio within an ICA session. It provides the ability to enable (or disable) audio for the client’s ICA sessions. Additionally, you can manage the amount of bandwidth consumed by an audio for an ICA session by changing the Sound quality settings ( Low, Medium or High). By setting the sound quality to High, the ICA session consumes a greater amount of bandwidth. 

These policy changes are made by importing and using the Citrix Receivers Icaclient.adm template which is located in the Configuration directory of the Citrix Receiver installation folder.

With Windows Receiver 14.3, adm files are only available in Windows XP Embedded and Windows 2003 server.

For all other OS we have replaced adm files with ADMX and ADML files.

The Citrix Receiver Group Policy for Client audio settings is located under the Group Policy folder path Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Citrix Components > Citrix Workspace > User Experience > Client Audio Settings

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Instructions

For all Policy Settings, now we have to use ADMX and ADML files. For loading ADMX and ADML file in GPO, use the following steps:

  1. Copy ADMX file in C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\

  2. Copy ADML files in C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\en-US

Restart your GPO. These files will get automatically loaded into your GPO.

​The audio Setting for an ICA session can be configured both on XenApp/Xendesktop Server or User Client device.

To configure the Client audio settings on XenApp/Xendesktop Server via group policy, perform the following steps:

  1. Change group policy setting from Not Configured to Enabled, and click Apply.

  2. Either select (or de-select) the Enable audio option to turn audio on, or off, for the client’s ICA session.

  3. Adjust the desired sound quality for the ICA session using the drop-down window under the Options section.

    User-added image
  4. After completing the desired settings for this group policy, run the gpupdate /force command, to ensure that the policy is correctly applied.


​To Configure Audio setting policies for User devices:

1. Load the group policy templates by following Configure Receiver with the Group Policy Object template.

  1. In the Group Policy Editor, expand Administrative Templates > Citrix Components > Citrix Workspace > User Experience.
  2. For Client audio settings, select Not Configured, Enabled, or Disabled.
    • Not Configured. By default Audio Redirection is enabled with high quality audio or previously configured custom audio settings.
    • Enabled. Audio redirection is enabled with selected options.
    • Disabled. Audio redirection is disabled.
  3. If you select Enabled, choose a sound quality. For UDP audio, use Medium (default).
  4. For UDP audio only, select Enable Real-Time Transport and then set the range of incoming ports to open in the local Windows firewall.
  5. To use UDP Audio with NetScaler Access Gateway, select Allow Real-Time Transport Through gateway. NetScaler Access Gateway should be configured with DTLS. For more information, see UDP Audio Through a Netscaler Gateway.
Reference: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenapp-and-xendesktop/7-15-ltsr/multimedia/audio.html​

Note: Server-side settings for audio quality take precedence over client side settings. The XenApp server does not have the ability to increase the quality of audio that is selected by the client. For example,  if the client side settings for Sound quality are set to Low, but the server policy settings for Client Audio Quality are set to High, the ICA session should run at Low audio quality.

XenApp Server-side settings for audio or sound quality are configured using XenApp policies as of Windows Server 2008, the ica-tcp port settings should not be used.

For XenApp 5.0 on Windows Server 2008, adjust the following:

  1. Open the XenApp Advanced Configuration Tool.

  2. Create a policy under:
    Client Devices > Resources > Audio > Sound Quality

  3. Set the Policy to Low , Medium, or High (the definitions are explained in the following section).

  4. Apply the policy.

​For XenApp 6.x and later on Widows Server 2008 R2, adjust the following:

You can work with policies through the Group Policy Management Console in Windows or the AppCenter in XenApp (formerly the Delivery Services Console). The console or tool used to complete this depends on whether or not your network environment includes Microsoft Active Directory and whether or not you have the appropriate permissions to manage Group Policy Objects (GPOs).

  1. Open the Delivery Services Console, Group Policy Management Console, or the Citrix AppCenter Console.

  2. Create a User Policy > Audio Section > Audio Quality.

  3. Set the Policy to Low, Medium, or High.

  4. Apply the filters you want the policy to be applied to.
    If using a XenApp console make sure the policy is enabled and prioritized to the desired level.

Audio Quality

Use the projected figures for each level of sound quality to calculate the bandwidth potentially consumed in connections to specific servers. For example, if 25 users record at Medium on one server, the bandwidth used in the connections to that server is over 52,500 bytes per second.

Bandwidth is consumed only while audio is recording or playing. If both occur at the same time, the bandwidth consumption is doubled.

To control sound quality, choose one of the following options:

  • Low - for low speed connections for low-bandwidth connections. Sounds sent to the client are compressed up to 16 Kbps. This compression results in a significant decrease in the quality of the sound but allows reasonable performance for a low-bandwidth connection. With both audio playback and recording, total bandwidth consumption is 22 Kbps at maximum.

  • Medium - optimized for speech for most LAN-based connections. Sounds sent to the client are compressed up to 64 Kbps. With both audio playback and recording, total bandwidth consumption is 33.6 Kbps at maximum.

  • High - high definition audio for connections where bandwidth is plentiful and sound quality is important. Clients can play sound at its native rate. Sounds can use up to 1.3 Mbps of bandwidth to play clearly. Transmitting this amount of data can result in increased CPU utilization and network congestion.

Issue/Introduction

This article describes how to enable and manage the Client audio settings option for the Citrix Receiver using a Group Policy.

Additional Information

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