Pulseaudio for WSL configuration

[pawelurbanski]

Dear Patrick,
I am filing this issue after exhausting the following paths to solve my problem:

• Changing variables one by one and testing the results,
• Following 2 different threads on the web claiming that sound under WSL works,
• WSL refers to wWSL2 witth updated Ubuntu 21.04,
• Reinstalling Pulseaudio from scratch,

If you could help out with a working configuration if you happen to have one or clarify a bit more the following:
What configuration directory is used by the windows service? There are 3 possible places or more, where configuration files can be or are placed:

• Program files folder with /ebc/...,
• Program data folder with: pulseaudio mentioned in hte log output,
• Administrator home folder .config/pulse/,

Which files should be modified to enable TCP protocol and allow connections from WSL. The WSL virtual machine is assigned a local network address from the pool in 172.16.0.0/12 - I found this vale in a few threads on the web.

Last but not least. Any hints about proper configuration on the WSL Linux side besides setting the $PULSE_SERVER environment variable to the assigned IpP address?

Thank you in advance for your time and help...
Pawel

[pgaskin]

The %PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\PulseAudio\etc\pulse\system.pa.d\ is the correct folder to place the system config fragments. I may add support for loading it from ProgramData later.

For setting the sever from the WSL2 side, based on what I know right now, I recommend adding export PULSE_SERVER="tcp:$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk '{ print $2 }')" to $HOME/.profile, then adding a Windows Firewall rule to allow the WSL2 network to access TCP port 4713. I haven't tested this yet since I don't use WSL2 right now, but it should work fine.

If anyone else is using WSL1, note that you can use the AF_UNIX interop and hardcode the default-server address in /etc/pulse/client.conf to point to the UNIX socket created by PulseAudio.