alsa-project
Change description of HiFi verbs
I wanted to raise this issue before creating a PR -- the string "Play HiFi quality Music" is not very good as a user-facing description for the output of their device's audio capability. The configuration enables both playback and capture (so "Play" is incomplete). There is nothing "Music"-specific about the output. And finally, "HiFi quality" feels like an anachronism at best.
Historically, we've used "Analog Stereo Duplex" for playback/capture and "Analog Stereo Input" or "Analog Stereo Output" for unidirectional configuration (these strings are also well translated at this point).
Another option is to use "Analog Audio", I suppose. Open to other options, if there are ideas.
Honestly, I believe this goes much deeper than naming.
Like for example, I have a Steinberg UR-44. It's a professional sound interface. There are many ways to map the input and output channels it has in a sensible way, but none of them are 'HiFi'.
What ALSA sees as 4 flat output channels aren't even output channels. They are internal stereo channels named Mix 1 and Mix 2, and the device can be programmed to do all sorts of things with them - so any of the forced naming like 'line 1' doesn't make sense.
Here are my thoughts on this:
- Do away with the forced hardcoded names completely
- Add translations for other languages than English
- Turn this into the a much more general audio device profile system
One more step from this is that the device(s) should be presented to the user in a good way. It's not necessarily just an alsa-ucm issue, but look how the UR-44 ends up looking in pipewire qpwgraph:
This is after I fixed it, and combed the wire mess into something you can look at.
But it should be possible to mark this whole thing as invisible somehow?
Sorry for hijacking the issue, but I think lifting the naming limitations should go along with some sort of overhaul...
