RFC: Duplicate in/out device naming

[Ken Thomases]

On Mar 27, 2012, at 11:04 AM, Andrew Eikum wrote:

> I added a prefix to each MMDevice indicating its flow direction.

> This solves the Rosetta Stone issue, as you can see in the bug. But
> when testing this in other applications, it quickly becomes silly.
> Audacity 1.3 adds its own "Out: " prefix to WinMM device names,
> creating "Out: Out: default" in the UI.

Meh.  I don't think that's a particularly troublesome side effect.  If no better solution presents itself, then I say this is the least bad of the alternatives.

That said...

> The unique identifier must be a prefix, as WinMM's szPname field truncates at 31 characters.

Is it really likely that identifiers will not leave any characters to spare?  Anyway, since WinMM is already arbitrarily truncating them, you can truncate them even earlier at 29 characters and suffix with as much of " output" or " input" as will fit.

Another approach is to prefix but using an obscure "code" which won't look silly when applications also prefix the device name.  For example, the ALSA driver might use "WAO" and "WAI" (for "Wine ALSA Output" and "Wine ALSA Input", respectively) or whatever.  These codes will be inscrutable, but not obviously redundant with an application-provided "Out: " prefix.  And users are already somewhat used to inscrutable terms in device names (for example, "HDA" meant nothing to me until I looked it up).

Regards,
Ken