I've got a KDE desktop on Debian 10 where I run Kodi, VLC, and web browsers, all produce audio streams. I'd like to capture the combined stream and render it on a Raspberry Pi (it's got a USB sound card) on my LAN.

The obvious solution would be SoX, "rec -c 2 -t wav | ssh Pi play". But every syntax for the rec(1) command that I have tried captures only white noise. Same with gst-launch-1.0.

Sorry if this question belongs elsewhere, but it spans desktop, network, and audio. And there are years-old threads in the KDE forums asking the same question there, and never any answers posted.

I don't use KDE, so I don't know if there is a "KDE" way of doing this, but I do this with "paprefs" - it's a pulseaudio preferences graphical utility. I have XFCE4 running on all of the relevant machines.

On the server, I go to the Network Server tab and set "Enable network access to local sound devices" and the sub-options (Allow other machines on the LAN to discover local sound devices and Don't require authentication.)

On the clients, I go to the Network Access tab and set "Make discoverable PulseAudio network sound devices available locally".

At that point, I might reboot the server because sometimes it doesn't seem to entirely "take" immediately.

On the client machines, the network audio output option is visible in XFCE4's pulseaudio volume control. I don't know how it looks in KDE, but it'll be something similar. To force everything to go to the network device, you can deactivate your local sound.

If your Raspberry Pi does not have a GUI (like XFCE4) installed, then it may be a bit more complicated to set up.

That said, I hope you're streaming sound over wired networking. I find performance fine over wired network but over wifi it just isn't really usable.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yeah it should be possible with using socat, pulseaudio, and ssh.

Something like:

edit default.pa
make sure
load-module module-esound-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1

(i think it could be more secure without auth-anonymous) come to think..

and then start pulseaudio. or restart it.

On the pc you want to send sound from you need to create an ssh connect with the -L flag to send the sound through.

ssh -L4000:localhost:4000 localipaddress of pc to recieve sound.

and then in the same ssh session you can go ahead and start socat with
socat TCP-listen:4000,fork TCP:localhost:4713

with this setup you can now receive sound from the pulseaudio server on port 4000.
maybe try

rec -c 2 -t wav | PULSE_SERVER=localhost:4000 ssh Pi play

helpful hints in gnome you can make use of gnome-session-inhibit and this process works this way.
fuser is a good command also for stale ports since sometimes after awhile after connecting and reconnecting the port will need it.