Microphone stops working after a few seconds on RDP

Question

I have a Realtek High Definition Audio sound card and Windows 7. It works fine both when playing and recording.

However when I connect to other computer, which has Windows 10 installed, via RDP and set Remote Audio setting to 'Record from this computer' and go to Sound settings I see that the microphone is working in 'Test your microphone' bar but only for a few seconds and then it stops working. When I go to Manage sound devices and disable/enable it - it work again for a few seconds, then stops. It behaves the same in Skype.

What can be wrong?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this is Microsoft trying to give an optimized experience.

When no audio is being played for a while, Microsoft disables the audio interface to safe bandwidth. If you then play some audio, after a bit of lag, the audio will be played. Microsoft does not even check for recording and that's where your problem comes from.

The solution, even if it is really strange, is to play audio on the remote computer. You can put the volume of the music player down to 0, that doesn't matter, but you need to keep the audio driver occupied, then audio will play correctly, and recording will keep working.