Program run in SSH accessing pulseaudio on the machine where it runs

Question

I would like to run a program remotely (through ssh) but with audio going to the remote machine where the program actually runs. This would normally work with ALSA, but pulseaudio apparently checks some session authenticator before allowing connection from a client.

How to make this check less strict?

local: $ ssh remote           # remote is running pulseaudio and has sound hardware

remote:$ paplay something.wav
Connection failure: Connection refused

pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused
remote:$ audacious something.mp3 # opens on local's X11 display
pulseaudio: Failed to connect to server: Connection refused
pulseaudio: Failed to connect to server: Connection refused

Answer 1

The culprit is that ssh does not set DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS which is used to connect to Pulseaudio. A solution (based on this post) was to add the following lines to my ~/.bashrc, which are used when connecting over ssh:

if [[ -n $SSH_CLIENT ]]; then
    export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=`cat /proc/$(pidof nautilus)/environ | tr '\0' '\n' | grep DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS | cut -d '=' -f2-`
fi

it uses the PID of nautilus (you may need to change that so to get some process which is always run in the session) and searches its environment variables for DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and exports it.

This make programs connecting to Pulse run fine. Other programs communicating over the session d-bus work as well (like audtool for driving audacious over command-line).

Answer 2

In my case, the following worked for me:

pax11publish -r