I’ve been trying NoMachine with audio, and I thought I’d share the results. I’ve tried .mp3, .m4a & .ogg (Ogg Vorbis) with both VLC v.1.1.9.0 and with HTML5 Audio played through Google Chrome, and with .wav & .flac played through VLC. I’m getting consistent results in every case.
1) When I first boot up into NoMachine the audio always has lots of pops, and using EAC I’ve recorded a typical example (see “Sample 1.mp3”). Keeping NoMachine running, and going in and out of various audio files I can eventually get clean playback on the local PC (but I can’t figure out how to reliably get to this point).
2) Having eventually got clean playback, I then toggle Play on/off at random. Most of the time “Play” results in clean audio, but maybe 10-20% of the time I get distortion, occasionally to the point that it’s difficult to hear that audio is even playing. I’ve recorded the effect in Samples 2-5. Interestingly when the audio is distorted, clicking to play the track from the beginning invariably fixes the problem and gives clean playback. I get exactly the same results toggling Play on/off using the Local keyboard and the Remote keyboard.
I’m not sure about Issue 1), but my instincts are that Issue 2) should be reproducible on other Windows PC’s.
Conclusion: I was interested in the possibility of using NoMachine as the basis for my home audio, but with the software in its present state this is clearly not viable.
Technical Details:
Local: Notebook running a fully-patched W7 Starter.
Remote: Desktop running a fully-patched XP Pro.
The two PC’s were connected by 100Mbps wired Ethernet, and both are running 5.1.7_8; no other applications were running on either machine, and the firewalls were both switched off.
I’m playing HTML5 audio with software I’ve written myself, and (NoMachine apart) the application works completely reliably. Note that playback is pure HTML5, and that it’s not video-intensive – within any one track the only thing that moves on the screen is a progress bar.
In every case I ran EAC on the Remote PC, recorded as .wav and then subsequently converted to .mp3. When the .mp3’s are played back they are a good reproduction of the sound I’m actually hearing on the local machine.