[pulseaudio-discuss] Purpose of ports that represent multiple UCM devices?

[Arun Raghavan]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020, at 5:15 AM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I did some work in PulseAudio's UCM code, and I got frustrated by the
> "combined port" concept. We spend a lot of effort supporting the case
> where one port represents multiple UCM devices, but I don't understand
> why we do that. Do you know some use case for that? I would like to
> drop the feature altogether.

UCM has the notion of being able to have multiple concurrently active devices in a verb. For example, for a phone with headphones plugged in, when a ringtone/alarm needs to be played, you might want to enable the handset and headphone device.

This is done with the SupportedDevices/ConflictDevices options in UCM.

While the use case is still relevant, I'm not sure if there are better ways to do this. I'll let Jaroslav chime in on that.

Cheers,
Arun