[pulseaudio-discuss] Device GUID like identifier

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Thu, 2010-06-10 at 11:47 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Thu, 10.06.10 15:06, Brendon Costa (brendon.j.costa at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> heya,
> 
> > I am integrating Pulse Audio into a cross platform VoIP API at work.
> > We currently allow a user of our API to use a "GUID" that is simply a
> > unique identifier for a audio device to identify a device. Thus they
> > can save this to a preferences file for example and on next load of
> > the app still be using the same audio device they were using if it is
> > available.
> > 
> > Is there any such source/sink identifier (or combination of
> > identifiers) I can use for and be sure it will uniquely identify a
> > device across system restarts?
> 
> You should not try to outsmart PA in the choice of devices for you.
> 
> That said, what you are looking for is usually encoded in the
> PA_PROP_DEVICE_SERIAL property of the devices. It is only set if such a
> serial number exists for a device.

Shouldn't the sink/source name be good enough? Doesn't Pulseaudio strive
to give stable and unique names to sinks and sources? So if there's a
serial number available, it probably ends up in the sink/source name
anyway, right?

At least the alsa devices seem to use udev variables that contain the
serial number, if a serial number is available. bluetooth-discover
assigns names with the MAC address, etc.

-- 
Tanu Kaskinen