[pulseaudio-discuss] update-card-properties? Possible?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2016-08-15 at 23:28 +1000, Bernd Wechner wrote:
> I notice it's possible to alter sink properties with 
> update-sink-properties but see no analog for card properties.
> 
> Specifically I find that pulse audio sets the device.description for 
> cards, to "Built-in Audio" if it's on the motherboard, but for USB sound 
> devices takes the USB property idProduct.
> 
> Either way I use lots of sound devices and they are apparently listed by 
> card device.description in the Sound settings app (Linux Mint Cinnamon) 
> and I'd like to be able to adjust the device.description for cards.
> 
> Is there a way to do this I'm not seeing?

I don't think there's any way for cards that are loaded by module-udev-
detect. If you disable module-udev-detect and load module-alsa-card
instances manually, then you can use the card_properties argument.

Patches for adding a set-card-description command for pactl (and to the
native protocol) would be welcome. I don't like the idea of adding a
more general "update-card-properties" command, however. The server uses
proplists for things that clients shouldn't be able to freely mess
with. If "update-card-properties" would be added, we would have to make
sure that the server doesn't trust the proplist values too much.

pacmd already has the update-sink-properties and other similar
commands, which may seem strange given what I wrote above, and indeed I
wish those commands didn't exist. It could be argued that not much
extra damage would be made by adding an update-card-properties command
to pacmd, and that might be true (I might even accept such patch), but
given that pacmd is semi-deprecated in favour of pactl, I'm not really
enthusiastic about adding new functionality to pacmd.

-- 
Tanu