[pulseaudio-discuss] Remapped sinks: Descriptions and disadvantages?

[Timothy J Massey]

Hello!

I'm slowly plodding along on my multi-zone system.  It's a lot easier to 
use names like "zone1" than "alsa_output.pci_8086_2668_alsa_playback_0", 
so I'm remapping the modules in default.pa.  It also gives me just a 
single location with hardware-specific names, which works well.  I'm using 
the following command:

        load-module module-remap-sink sink_name=zone1 
master=alsa_output.pci_8086_2445_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0 channels=2 
master_channel_map=front-left,front-right 
channel_map=front-left,front-right

The only disadvantage of this that I can see is that pavucontrol shows 
both sinks when you go to move a stream to a different sink, and the name 
of the remapped sink is not very helpful:

        Intel 82801BA-ICH2 - Intel 82801BA-ICH2
        Remapped Intel 82801BA-ICH2 - Intel 82801BA-ICH2

Especially for now, I can live with it, but is it possible to control the 
device.description of a remapped sink?

Also, while I'm asking, are there disadvantages (especially performance) 
to remapping a sink like this?  For example, in comparing the sink 
information between the original and remapped sink, it seems that the 
remapped sink does not have HARDWARE HW_MUTE_CTRL HW_VOLUME_CTRL like the 
original sink does.  Will this affect CPU usage or audio quality?

Finally, my last question is this:  is there a way to control the actual 
name and description given to the original sink?  Especially in the 
short-term, I don't mind having to statically configure the devices in, 
say, default.pa, even if that means I can't hot-plug new devices.  I would 
certainly do this if there are CPU or quality advantages to not doing the 
module-remap-sink.

Thank you very much for your thoughts!  I appreciate your help.

Timothy J. Massey