my understanding is that named pipe only works on the same computer, maybe for windows even across multiple machines (but I am unclear about that).
Our scenario is that we run Audacity on a Windows10 VM, but our Python notebooks on a powerful CentOS linux server. We would love to remote control (windows) audacity from that (linux) Python jupyter notebooks.
Namely display and listen to specific audio files, including manipulating label tracks, based on speech or speaker recognition.
Would it be possible to add a gRPC server (inluding authentication like oauth2) ?
It is “possible” in some cases to control Audacity over a network, though probably a bad idea to do so.
Audacity has been developed as a Desktop application to run on the local computer, so there is no security hardening for running on a server or across a network. (See: Scripting - Audacity Manual)
Making Audacity sufficiently secure across a network would be a big job that would only benefit a tiny minority of users, so I don’t personally think that it will be happening any time soon.
For the “special case” of running Audacity across a private network, perhaps you could use a “Remote Desktop” app such as Remmina or NoMachine.