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
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