playing a sound/notification in finch over ssh on my local machine

Question

So I have finch, a command line chat client (think pidgin) running on a remote machine that I ssh into. finch has notification sounds and can run a command when certain events occur, letting you pass the sound file in as %s. e.g. mplayer %s

from the remote machine, when the notification occurs, what kind of command could I run to play whatever %s is on my local machine?

Answer 1

If you use pulse-audio as sound server, you can use module-native-protocol-tcp to accept tcp connection from your remote machine.

In the following example, I use an ssh tunnel to forward the audio request from remote machine to the local one.

On the local machine, do something like:

pactl load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1
ssh -R 9999:127.0.0.1:4713 you@remotehost

then on remote machine you can use paplay

paplay -s 127.0.0.1:9999 soundfile.wav

ADDED I discovered that auth-ip-acl does not accept localhost as a valid parameter, you have to use 127.0.0.1 (or whatever your machine uses localhost address).

EDIT It should be ssh -R, not ssh -L (we are forwarding a remote port to a local port).

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If you have an old version of pulse-audio (pre 0.9.3), you can use cookie based authorization.

pactl load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1 auth-cookie-enabled=0
scp ~/.pulse-cookie you@remotehost:
ssh -R 9999:localhost:4713 you@remotehost

Obviously, you can simply do not use any authentication in pulse-audio but I can not recommend you this solution. Use, at least, a firewall to avoid remote connections.