Note: this won’t allow you to use ASIO via RDP. As far as I know there’s no way to do that. If someone knows of a way to do that, please let me know lol.

So I spent the majority of my day wrestling with this issue and was finally able to find a solution. Let me start by saying that this solution won’t work for anybody trying to record anything via RDP, but it does address my (and probably most of C3 users) problem, which was playback.

I built a new PC a couple weeks ago and today was the first time I accessed it via RDP. I had a project I was working on in Reaper that I wanted to review so naturally I opened the application and clicked play. The only problem was it wouldn’t start playback. I figured it was a problem with the selected audio device (I’ve run into this before) so I went and switched it to “WaveOut” which has worked traditionally for me….and it still wouldn’t play.

Reaper would say it was “Playing” but the cursor wouldn’t move, and there was no audio coming through. I knew it wasn’t a problem with the audio itself over RDP, because all system sounds were working. I double checked and sure enough, audio from everything else I tried (browsers, games, system sounds) worked.

I proceeded to spend the next 6 hours looking into alternative drivers, settings, and configurations (Windows and Reaper) looking for a solution. No matter what I tried though, nothing worked.

My old system that had been working previously was a Windows installation (via Bootcamp) on my iMac. I booted that back up and accessed it via RDP. As before, it was still working with no problems, so I doublechecked the configuration and didn’t notice anything different.

I finally gave up and packed up for the day. When I got back to my local machine I figured I would try one more thing. I had been RDPing from a MacBook Pro, so I tried RDP from my iMac Windows machine to the new PC and suddenly… it was working. Why would it work from the Windows Client and not from the macOS client though???

So I double checked the configuration settings again and noticed something strange. Reaper has an “Input” and an “Output” setting for each audio device. They hadn’t changed (though I had changed them probably 30 times each over the course of the day), but the “Input” option on my iMac Windows session didn’t have the “Remote Audio” option. It only had the “Microsoft Sound Mapper” option. The new PC however had “Microsoft Sound Mapper” and “Remote Audio” as options under both “Input” and “Output”. In addition to this, the Windows RDP Client separates “Playback” from “Recording” under it’s audio preferences, whereas the Mac client lumps them under a single “Audio Playback” option. The windows client “Recording” option was set to be disabled by default. There was no such option on the Mac client.

I checked under “Recording Devices” on both machines, and sure enough the iMac Windows said “no devices listed” while the PC had it’s “Remote Audio” device that Windows automatically sets up when accessing via RDP. I’m guessing there is either an incompatible driver or no driver in the Bootcamp Setup for Recording Devices over RDP, which means Windows isn’t able to set one up and thus a conflict in Reaper is avoided.

So I attempted to disable the device through normal means, but unfortunately Windows won’t allow you to. You can’t simply “disable the device”, and removing/uninstalling the drivers for it doesn’t work either. Not entirely sure why. I remembered another option from earlier in the day that I had been working with though.

You can configure RDP settings specifically using the “Edit Group Policy” option in the Control Panel. I bring it up by just typing in the search bar next to the start menu.

Specifically, the option to configure is under Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Device and Resource Redirection. You want to set “Allow Audio Recording Redirection” to “Disabled”. This will prevent Windows from creating the virtual “Remote Audio” device when you connect via RDP.

As suspected, once I made this change Reaper no longer gave me any problems with playback over RDP. And thus my very long exhausting day of research, configuration changes, and tearing my hair out came to a close.

The settings persisted after restarts, across multiple OS versions/clients, etc. So hopefully I (and you, if this helped you) won’t run into this again. At least not until a fresh Windows install…

Hopefully this helps somebody. If there is something that wasn’t explained well enough, let me know and I’ll try to elaborate.. It’s been a very long day and I didn’t feel up to gathering screenshots.

Either way, at least I got it figured out for myself! Now back to my Rock Band Customs… ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif” />