On Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 4:26 PM Tim <termtech@rogers.com> wrote:

On 10/03/2018 04:00 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 3:41 PM Tim <termtech@rogers.com
> <mailto:termtech@rogers.com>> wrote:
>
> That is why port aliases are SO VERY important and should
> never be removed from Jack.
>
>
> port aliases are an ad-hoc hack.
>
> the correct solution was added to jack1, but never (AFAIK) to jack2, and
> that's metadata, along with well-known metadata keys such as "pretty-name".
>
> port aliases should go away, and be replaced by metadata.
>

But when you and I last spoke of this, I was disappointed to learn
that there were no plans to put default information in that meta-data,
like the information that is provided in those alias names.
So as I understood, the meta-data would be blank by default.
You demonstrated that meta-data does work - but you had to provide
that information from your own list.

Am I mistaken? Would such information be available by default?

In Jack1 when I left it, the server doesn't create any metadata. But there's no hard policy on that, and technically the ALSA driver itself is in the best position to get information from hardware to set up "pretty-name".

Port aliases also have no official policy either.