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Question

Remote Computer Lab with Audio?

  • October 6, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 23 views
bethjohnson
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Looking for recommendations. Is anyone providing remote access to computer labs for digital media applications with a product that allows the client to hear sound from the host?

We've got a high end lab (15 machines) with music apps that didn't provide pandemic student licenses, and need a remote client-server setup with sound for a few edge cases. Higher ed, so we can expect students to do some of the setup on their end, but we're trying to keep it as simple as possible. Thanks.

Need to have:
- audio capability from lab computer/server
- deployable and configurable via Jamf+profile+script *
Nice to have:
- easy client configuration
- edu pricing

*If necessary, the faculty member can visit and configure manually, but he's a new convert to the post-imaging world and if we can do it all from Jamf it'll be more convincing!

~ You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems. -- James Clear

    3 replies

    E
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    • epomelow
    • New Contributor
    • October 6, 2020

    We did some research and proof of concepts of this back in March and April. We tried using VNC, but that doesn't support audio passthrough. We ended up using RemoteLabs which offers remote access including for both windows and mac. On windows, it sets up an RDP session which passed audio over the connection. On macs however, it still used the VNC protocol.

    I tried RealVNC which supposedly supported audio, but it didn't work. I've heard products like Splashtop and Aqua both support audio passthrough, but they are designed mostly for the 1 to 1 setup where a user would log into their workstation. Teamviewer might offer a solution too, since you can set up unattended access to the computers, configure it to only allow a single user at a time, and then sync the users so they can sign in.

    We use TeamViewer with the quick support function for remote & help services with our support desk, and I've seen audio carry through that. The downside is that on Catalina, you must manually enable the allow screen recording function. This isn't configurable with PPPC. The benefit of it is that since you only have 15 clients, you might be able to get away purchasing 15 concurrent licenses and then create the additional users, so that only 15 users can be logged in at any time.

    J
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    • JamesJhoung
    • New Contributor
    • October 6, 2020

    We've looked at a bunch of different solutions (open source, in-house, and paid) and we ended up going with Splashtop. The pricing isn't too bad and they've added a lot of features along the way that made it slightly easier to manage.

    https://www.splashtop.com/remote-labs

      WilsonFredonia
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      We ended up going with Leostream (https://www.leostream.com/) which utilizes NoMachine's Freeware NX connection. It ends up actually being fairly robust. The downside is the additional need for students to install NoMachine on their computers, which attempts to turn them into servers. Due to that, we have extensive documentation on how to cripple that on their own machines.

      I can definitely say it is not envision on hitting everything on my wishlist but it was the best that we could find at the time.

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