RFC: Duplicate in/out device naming

[Paul Chitescu]

On Wednesday 28 March 2012 04:43:54 pm Ken Thomases wrote:
> 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

Maybe add some extra checks like:
- If it's input and it doesn't already contain (case insensitive) "input" or 
"capture" or "microphone" append " Input" (as much as it fits in buffer)
- If it's output and it doesn't already contain (case insensitive) "output" or 
"playback" or "speaker" append " Output" (as much as it fits in buffer)

Paul