[pulseaudio-discuss] giving custom names to devices

[Jost-Philip Matysik]

Hi!

Mark Greenwood wrote:
> 
> 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

Is there any news on this? For me it's just cosmetics, but I'm
sorry to report routing her audio from "PAPLAY:STDIN" to
"USB_0777:x3425" just to have music in the kitchen is something my
girlfriend won't accept as practical any time soon...


I believe it should be possible using virtual ALSA devices (like the
ones used to combine 3 stereo cards into multichannel). As I understand
it it should be possible to create a virtual device with a catchy name
in .asoundrc and then patch all channels through to the hardware
device. But I've never really dealt with alsa configuration so I don't
know how these virtual devices handle sample rate and bitrate etc, and
considering that hardware autodetect works really great in Pulseaudio
it seems like a lot of work and opportunity for desaster when all I
want is customize a display name...

Jost