Unfortunately, in the linux desktop world, some things just don't work. Especially when it comes to webinars, web conferencing and the like, where the focus is on Windows desktops. Using RDP to a virtual or physical Windows box is a good solution, except when it comes to audio. Audio jitter/stutter is almost guaranteed on an RDP session. Googling the topic, you'll even find several "experts" saying its just not possible to have quality audio over RDP.
The linux RDP client "rdesktop" was historically built against OSS, and under Ubuntu it was patched to work with ASLA, as OSS is kinda considered "old and non-standard". So, yay, Ubuntu's rdesktop works with "-r sound:local" to get sound over an RDP session.. but again.. jittery - even over gigabit LAN.
Virtualbox comes with a custom RDP client, rdesktop-vrdp, which was tweaked for virtual rdp sessions, but still uses OSS, and therefore there is NO sound on RDP sessions (unless of course you build OSS support on your system - just not there in Ubuntu).
Alas! The PulseAudio developers built this wrapper "padsp", which "starts the specified program and redirects its access to OSS compatible audio devices (/dev/dsp and auxiliary devices) to a PulseAudio sound server." The result of running rdesktop-vrdp via this wrapper is just amazing.. audio is just PERFECT! Absolutely no jitter in the audio at all. Not only on a local network, but even across WAN.
Its so simple to launch too: "padsp rdesktop-vrdp -r sound:local .....(whatever other params)"
padsp is part of pulseaudio-utils in Ubuntu
I have no idea why this wrapper works so good.. but kudos to the developers! Or maybe its just OSS that is so efficient with networked audio?? If anyone knows, let us know in comments below.
