[pulseaudio-discuss] udev detection for 1 card with multiple devices

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and abraham duenas at 11/10/10 20:40 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi and thanks for your feedback!
> 
> I'm in the creation of my profile, I have a basic one on which I'm
> experimenting and what I did to add the multiple hw device is to hard
> code them like this:
> [Mapping X]
> device-strings = hw:0,3 
> ..............................
> [Mapping Y]
> device-strings = hw:0,2
> 
> etc... these seems to work for me but not sure if this is the proper (or
> most effective way).

I think that's the best way, but not 100% sure. There is the whole rule
of "don't use "hw:" directly but I think when writing your own profile
it's acceptable. I'm afraid I've not got a huge amount of experience
with this side of things tho' :(

> What I'm also wondering is if I should also create my "paths"... the
> default ones work ok for me but I should notice that all my amixer
> controls have really really different names than the default ones. In
> other words I don't have any "[Element Line]" or any "[Element Aux]" at
> all (I do have [Element Capture] but that's it)

Well these "standard" names are generally not found on all h/w. One of
the problems we try and deal with is the vast and varying different
mixer elements found on a variety of hardware. I personally don't have
Line or Aux either here, but other h/w will and they need to be checked
and discarded if not present. This is perfectly OK.


> an although I understand
> these are DEFAULT ones which may apply to most of the cards I'm just
> curious about up to what extent I can benefit from them....

Well, like I say, they may not be present on "most" cards, but certain
enough to warrant checking them.

> So I started
> experimenting with those paths and was able to create 2 "connector"s
>  (this is how they appear on my gnome-sound-preferences in the output
> tab), one for my card headphone speakers and one for my card handsfree
> speakers. I cannot get any "connector" using the default paths that come
> with my PA package.... so I'm still playing around to see what else can
> I do but not sure if these is the right way to go or not really....

Yes, Connectors in gnome-sound-prefs is the same thing as "ports" in
pavucontrol (I'll probably rename them to be more standard).

The general idea behind connectors is to select mutually exclusive
options for a given device, e.g. Headphones vs. Speakers for output or
Line In vs. Mic for input.

If you have a rather "exotic" card it may be you do indeed need to write
custom paths or adjust the default ones to probe more deeply for
different scenarios.

Either way, once you have things working effectively, we can include you
improvements in the official distribution so others with the same h/w
can get a nice experience out of the box :)

Cheers

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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