On Sat, 2020-02-22 at 08:53 +0200, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
On Sun, 2020-02-16 at 18:38 +0100, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
Dne 16. 02. 20 v 11:06 Tanu Kaskinen napsal(a):
On Sun, 2020-02-16 at 11:42 +0200, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
- pulseaudio-discuss@lists.freedesktop.org
On Sat, 2020-02-15 at 17:25 +0100, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
Actually, I am also trying to resolve the description of the speaker configuration. It may not be only enough to give the PCM device, because we don't know, if user connected the stereo or surround speakers to the sound card output for example. I play with an idea to add device variants to UCM, but the question is, how we can map this to pulseaudio profile/port schematics.
My quick idea is to export those variants via the verbs, so the exported verb names might look like:
HiFi:Speaker-Stereo HiFi:Speaker-5.1
Where 'HiFi' is the verb name, 'Speaker' is the device name and 'Stereo' is the variant name.
If we need to define multiple variants, all may be exported like:
HiFi:Speaker-5.1,Mic-4.0
Also, we can enhance this and store the configuration to a file, thus 'HiFi' can refer to 'HiFi@Speaker-5.1,Mic-4.0' by default.
Verb + list-of-device-variants sounds like a good way to map UCM devices to pulseaudio profiles (and if there's just one verb, which I expect to be the common case, don't show it in the profile name). I don't know how the variants should be configured in UCM, but I know that device variants should be able to declare conflicts with other devices (or device variants). For example, 5.1 speaker output may make recording impossible, while stereo speaker output can be used toghether with a mic. If this information is not provided by UCM, pulseaudio will have to probe all variant combinations (like it currently does with the legacy mixer system).
Sorry, now I realized that the Verb + list-of-device-variants scheme doesn't really work after all as the profile scheme. Or maybe it does, but it's significantly different from what we do currently. Switching between Headphones and Speaker-Stereo often doesn't require reopening the PCM device, so there's no need for separate Headphones and Speaker- Stereo profiles. I guess we could still create separate profiles, it just means that the profile list will get much longer.
We could add a separate optimization step to the profile creation process. That is, first create all possible device-variant combinations as the initial profile list, and then inspect which profiles can be merged. Naming the merged profiles becomes a problem, but I imagine it's solvable with static rules (e.g. merging Speakers-Stereo and Headphones becomes Analog-Stereo), and if necessary the merging can be improved gradually over time.
From profile creation perspective the ideal scheme would be not based
on UCM devices but on PCM devices and their configuration variants, but I imagine naming would be an even bigger problem with this scheme (how to map PCM device names to sensible user friendly names?).
I think that I didn't explain my idea in detail. The variant verbs may be almost identical (thus all devices will be defined) like the "master" one. But the specific variant configuration will be returned to the application. So it will differ only in the channel count value for the Speaker device or so. The PCM device name + PCM parameters check will be fine. I don't think that we should modify something on the PA side. PA activates only one verb per soundcard now.
Oh, you want to create variant verbs? Is the idea that all possible device combinations will be made separate verbs? That would make life easier for PulseAudio, but wouldn't it mean a lot more work for UCM configuration writers? Rather than generating the device combinations automatically in PulseAudio, the combinations would have to be manually listed in every UCM configuration.
I think it would be better to define only one verb per sound card and declare the conflicts between the devices or device variants, and let PulseAudio automatically generate the device combinations as profiles.
I may be misunderstanding something, I didn't for example understand what you meant by "the PCM device name + PCM parameters check will be fine". Some examples could be useful. Let's say that there's a sound card that has stereo output (either headphones or line-out), 4.0 output, 5.1 output, SPDIF output and stereo input. If input is used, 5.1 output can't be used at the same time. Would UCM define the following verbs?:
HiFi:Headphones,SPDIF,Mic HiFi:Line-Stereo,SPDIF,Mic HiFi:Line-4.0,SPDIF,Mic HiFi:Line-5.1,SPDIF
I'm currently writing UCM configuration for Audigy2, because PulseAudio's default configuration doesn't work with that card properly. I'm creating verbs for each possible device combination, and I ran into a naming issue. How should "bidirectional" devices be listed in the verb name? If there's both line-out and line-in and SPDIF supports both input and output, maybe the verb name could be for example this:
HiFi:Line-4.0-Out,SPDIF-Out,Line-Stereo-In,SPDIF-In
The device name in SectionDevice would be just "Line" or "SPDIF".
I don't really like bidirectional devices, i.e. I'd prefer have separate SectionDevice names for Line-In and Line-Out, but I guess merging them into one device can work.