[pulseaudio-discuss] Description for virtual sinks

[Maarten Bosmans]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 26.03.09 19:16, Maarten Bosmans (mkbosmans at gmail.com) wrote:
>> Another approach is separate set-*-property commands. I would really
>> like to be able to fire up pacmd and just say:
>>
>>   set-sink-input-property StreamName media.artist "Artist Name"
>>
>> These commands could even entirely replace the suggested syntax for
>> load-module. You could just do:
>>
>>   load-module module-alsa-sink device="hw:0,0" sink_name=asink
>>   set-sink-property asink foo "bar waldo"
>>   set-sink-property asink yippieh wow
>
> Doesn't really work either. It is important that those properties are
> set right when the sink/source/card is created instead of later
> on. Why? Some properties are relevant for policy decisions,
> i.e. setting device type to "headset" might have the effect that all
> "phone" tagged streams are moved over to it. And we want to make sure
> that only one atomic policy decision needs to take place, not many
> with incomplete property sets.

Yeah, you're right. The reason I came up with the desire for adjusting
the sink description is that loading module-remap-sink multiple times
for the same master sink results in remapped sinks that all have the
description "Remapped OriginalSinkName", upon which
module-zeroconf-publish complains that there is a name collision. Not
providing the custom description directly at load-module time probably
wouldn't solve this.

Nonetheless, as I said before, I think that these commands can be
useful on their own. My use case is that I fire up an internet radio
stream with GStreamer to a Pulse sink, but there is no metadata
included in the stream. There is however a url I can check and parse
the artist and song name from. I would like to be able to update the
stream name with a script to reflect the current artist and song.

Are you willing to except patches to extent the pulse CLI with this
functionality? I was thinking of adding the following commands:
set-{sink,source,sink-input,source-output}-property
with the syntax
set-sink-property sinkname propname1=propval1 propname2=propval2

Maarten