[pulseaudio-discuss] ALSA with UCM, localized names, nice icons and form factor

[Paul Kocialkowski]

Hi,

over the past few days, I have been working on integrating the Chromebook 13
CB5-311 from Acer with userspace ALSA and Pulseaudio. Support for it using the
alsa-mixer module is far from perfect, so I decided to go with ALSA UCM instead.

There are a few things that I currently can't get working with alsa-ucm as well
as alsa-mixer.

First, the device names are taken as provided from the UCM config and are not
localized. alsa-mixer.c's path_verify and option_verify functions provide
description maps that lead to using localized names for devices, which is much
nicer for users. I would like to have a similar feature for UCM. Can anyone
suggest a proper way to do this?

Also, alsa-mixer's configuration will provide a device.icon_name that is
appropriate for each type of device, which results in such nice icons being
displayed in e.g. GNOME's sound control settings. There is no mechanism in place
to have something equivalent with UCM. Can anyone suggest a proper way to get
this going?

Similarly, there is no way to report the form factor of a device, which is used
by e.g. GNOME-Shell volume control[0] in the tray. It falls back to matching a
"headphone" string to decide whether to go with a headphones or speaker icon.
Note that there is no better way to do this in alsa-mixer and the only form
factors reported currently come from the udev module, that gets the info from
udev matching USB/PCI/etc device strings.

Cheers!

[0]: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/tree/js/ui/status/volume.js#n171

-- 
Paul Kocialkowski, developer of low-level free software for embedded devices

Website: https://www.paulk.fr/
Coding blog: https://code.paulk.fr/
Git repositories: https://git.paulk.fr/ https://git.code.paulk.fr/
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