[pulseaudio-discuss] giving custom names to devices

[Jost-Philip Matysik]

Am Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:17:54 +0200
schrieb Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net>:

> On Tue, 30.06.09 04:15, Lennart Poettering (lennart at poettering.net)
> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Sat, 20.06.09 01:07, Jost-Philip Matysik (matysik at tu-harburg.de)
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > 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...
> > 
> > We actually do our best to find a good high-level name for all
> > devices. If this shows up weirdly like this please make sure that
> > you USB device is properly known by usb.ids. If it isn't make sure
> > to file a patch to that to make it well known. "lsusb" shows you the
> > informatin from usb.ids.
> 
> And if you cannot updatre hwdata, then you can always write a little
> udev rule to set the SOUND_DESCRIPTION udev property for the
> device. PA will then use that as device description. (only 0.9.16)
> 
> Lennart
> 

Thanks for the hint, I really have to learn how to write udev rules for
this kind of stuff sometime!

I'm not sure however if this can really solve my "problem" with naming.
As a tech geek I don't really mind streaming audio to "Intel HDA" or
"Terratec USB", and I also don't care wether it's called "Terratec Dual
USB" or "USB-device 035x077c-0473957223" as long as I can uniquely
identify them.
PA does a fairly good job assigning readable names to devices.

What I'm going at however is assigning pretty, highly personalized,
purpose-oriented names to sinks, like "Kitchen speakers", "Bedroom"
or "Large Green Headset", so that even my girlfriend's mother can
easily operate our audio system when she's babysitting, without any
prior knowledge of the actual hardware wiring.

Personally I don't care wether to assign these names using udev or
pacmd, but it's certainly nothing either program can just lookup from a
worldwide database of device names, since it's purely system specific.
Therefore as a user I would first look for such an option in pulseaudio
rather than udev, since it's not really about what soundcards I use,
but about what I chose to use them for...


I managed to accomplish the renaming using a pacmd script run at login.
It works, so it's definitely no showstopper, but it would be nice to
have a GUI front-end for this.

Jost