Forwarding audio elsewhere on Linux

These days I’ve been attending to an online course that require me not to do anything else in the user session beside watching and listening.

Actually I’ve been able to pass two checks while I’ve been hacking on another machine, just listening and watching now and then.

But it’s boring to plug headphones into the “secondary” machine and switch off the audio on the main one.

Luckily we have PulseAudio on Linux.

It was just a matter on

1. using paprefs and telling to listen on the net,
2. issuing pactl load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl<span class="o">=</span><span class="m">rigel.local</span>
3. on the secondary machine launching PULSE_SERVER=rigel.local firefox

Voilà, the audio of firefox is forwarded. Ok, uncompressed and unencrypted, but it’s on my own LAN, so that’s not a problem