Enable microphone in HyperV VM and RDP session

In a virtual machine in Hyper-V, or if you are in an RDP connection, the microphone is not automatically redirected from your PC. This means you don’t have a microphone available in the VM / RDP session. In the Sound properties, in Recording, you will see “No audio devices are installed”

To redirect the microphone from your host, you must adjust the connection settings before connecting.

Add the microphone in a HyperV virtual machine

To add the microphone to a virtual machine through the Hyper-V Manager, follow these steps:

1. Connect to the Virtual Machine from the HyperV Manager console. Right-click a VM and click Connect…
2. Check if you have an Enhanced Session. Click the View menu -> enable Enhanced Session
3. In the Connect to <VM name>, click Show Options
   (if you don’t get this screen, reset the HyperV checkboxes)
4. Go to the Local Resources tab and click Settings
   
   
5. In Audio Settings, enable “Record from this Computer” under Remote Audio Recording
   
6. Continue to connect to the Virtual Machine. Your microphone should now be redirected.

Reset existing Enhanced Session settings in HyperV

If you ever checked the box “Save my settings for future connections to this virtual machine”, the Connect to <VM> will no longer appear when you start an enhanced session. Instead, HyperV connects directly to the VM.

To make the VM Connection options screen reappear, do the following:

1. In Hyper-V Manager, right-click on the Host, and choose Hyper-V Settings…
   
   
2. Go to the Reset Check Boxes menu, click Reset and click OK.
   

Add the microphone in a Remote Desktop session

To add the microphone in an RDP session, basically do the same as with HyperV:

1. In the RDP Connect to screen, click Show Options
2. Go to the Local Resources tab and click Settings…
   
3. Enable “Record from this computer” and click OK
   
   

Final notes

This post applies to roughly every Windows OS; Windows 2008, Windows 2012, Windows 2016, Windows 2019, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10
In some cases, you may need to enable redirection in the Group Policy of the session host. That’s pretty out of the scope of this blogpost but beware of that. If the above steps don’t work. checking the Group Policy should be your next.