Sound information discovery

[iain <iain prettypeople org>]

Yo,

This idea is going to be post 2.2, but I thought I'd get the discussion
started on it.

As we get more and more audio applications it would be nice if they all
referred to the same sound cards and the controls by the same name.

At the moment gnome-volume-control can rename controls internally, but
it would be nice if the other applications used the changed names.
Applications that I can think of that could benefit from this:
gnome-cd, gnome-sound-recorder, gst-player, gst-record, the
volume-applet and the cdplayer-applet. There's bound to be more, thats
left up to the reader.

My idea is to have a seperate library that handles control/card
discovery: For example it should be able to tell you that theres 3 cards
in the machine and they're offically called emu10k1 cmipci and emu10k2.
It can then handle the mappings from 'emu10k1' to 'SB Live!', 'emu10k2'
to 'Extigy' and 'cmipci' to 'Crap internal card'

It would thne be able to do the same thing for the controls, as well as
tell you if the control is mono/stereo, has panning, can be a record
source...etc.

This is all just my thoughts on this subject. Do people have other
ideas, think this isn't needed etc?

iain
-- 
"That rock and roll could never hip hop like this"