[pulseaudio-discuss] giving custom names to devices

[Mark Greenwood]

On Wednesday 25 February 2009 20:37:04 H.S. wrote:
> Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > On Wed, 25.02.09 12:14, H.S. (hs.samix at gmail.com) wrote:
> > 
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> Is it possible to give custom names to audio devices?
> >>
> >> Presently the audio devices have long cryptic names listed in the device
> >> chooser. If possible I would like give these devices custom user
> >> friendly names. For example, my Micorosft LX-3000 USB headset is listed as:
> >> ALSA PCM on front:1(USB Audio) via DMA
> > 
> > Only very old versions of PA created descriptions like these. The
> 
> This is on Debian Testing using pulseaudio 0.9.10-3.
> 
> 
> > current logic uses the card name information from ALSA and tries to
> > avoid any more technical information in that name.
> > 
> > THe names still suck though because that creates names like "USB-Audio
> > - USB Device 0x471:0x311".
> > 
> > It would be much better if we could use the lspci or lsusb text. That
> > information is available via HAL, but I don't see how to get that data
> > correctly. i.e. we could go up in the hal tree until we find a
> > useful description. But I am a bit afraid that this might cause us to
> > take the description from the PCI bridge if the pci devcies connected
> > to it lack one.
> 
> 

Something I wondered about was whether it would be possible to give devices user-defined names. This would help specifically when network sinks are in use, so that I could send audio to 'Kitchen' instead of 'powermac snapper (00:10) on mac'... trips off the tongue a little easier, is all :)

Mark