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

[Bernd Wechner]

Thanks Tanu, your observations are every very helpful and time saving.

If I may, I'd ask an ancillary question. It's not actually the card's 
device.description I want to change. I just had a curious question about 
that because that is what is used at present by the Sound settings app 
in Linux MINT (Cinnamon) to identify sound devices.

Only I find that wholly inadequate and have the strong desire to name my 
sound devices as I manage quite a number and even in the simplest case 
of two onboard sound devices on a NUC the names not at all useful in 
identifying which is which on the ports.

The use-case I'm after is simple:

  * Open Sound settings app.
  * Edit name of sound device to reflect my configs.
  * See the device thusly described thence-forth in the Sound settings
    app at least, ideally in any app of mixer that works with cards.

That's looking like a biggish sort of ask as I don't even suspect 
device.description is the right place for it, as that is populated with 
something semi sensible already. Though it might be, as I'm not sure if 
there's a pulaseaudio spec that states that card.device.description 
should be used to identifying cards in apps that work with them.

It might rather be that the most appropriate path forward is a new 
property like card.device.name that is editable and has methods for 
setting it and remembering it. But that actually raises the question, 
whether such a property belongs in pulseaudio at all or in alsa?

Or I note that ports sometimes have a device.product.name property, 
which if it's an HDMI or DisplayPort device seems to contain a lucid 
name for the device. Perhaps support for a port property like 
device.description is consistent with the paradigm in place, and it 
could be made editable/updatable and then Sounds Settings apps can use 
this in their titles for sound devices?

My experience is not deep. I'm dishing for wisdom.

Either way I see this is likely a common use case among people working 
much with sound, and a real bother.  Printers don't have this problem, I 
can name them. Awesome. And the name is distinct form the description.

Regards,

Bernd.


Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> pulseaudio-discuss mailing list
> pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss


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