I want to stream audio from my desktop (which only has headphones) to my raspberry pi, which is attached to speakers.

The only thing I need is to be able to grab the audio playing from my computer... from the terminal so that I can pipe it. Eg

I know I can use some other programs (like audacity) to record sound, perhaps is there anything in the cli that can do this and write to stdout?

Using Linuxmint 18. I believe it uses pulseaudio

Got a working setup


Desktop:
Rpi:
I'd like to remove the ffmpeg completely but it didn't seem to work unless it used a lossy compression (flac, wav didn't work but opus, ogg, mp3 worked)
I also put the nc -l in a while loop since it makes it easier to reconnect to it.

EDIT:

I have a much better command that uses ssh

Does your raspberry pi have pulseaudio installed too? If so look at the "Direct Connection" section here: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Sof.../User/Network/

On your PC you should be able to set the $PULSE_SERVER environment variable to be the IP address of the pi, and on the pi load the module-native-protocol-tcp module so it accepts network connections. You can either load the module using pacmd or if you have X use paprefs. If you use pacmd you will have pass some options to load-module to specify the allowed IP addresses that can connect. If you use paprefs (which is what I used) then under the network server tab you just need to enable network access and don't require authentication.