Hi,
So I hooked up 3 Roland Boutique devices to Ardour.
All showing up with the string “Boutique MIDI 1 [1]” to [3]. Pretty vague if you ask me.
Anyway, when I ran the ‘lsusb’ command I got “Roland Corp. Boutique” which is clearly not any better.
So I fiddled arround and added the devices to a usb.ids file:
ID 0582:01ff Roland Corp. Boutique D-05
ID 0582:028e Roland Corp. Boutique JX-08
ID 0582:028c Roland Corp. Boutique JD-08
And submitted them to the global usb.ids database.
Still, no change in output.
Seems systemd is active in this field as well these days with something called hwdb.
So I added the next section to /etc/udev/hwdb.d/20-usb-vendor-model.hwdb and ran some commands like ''systemd-hwdp update", “udevadm hwdb --update” and “udevadm trigger”.
usb:v0582p01ff*
ID_MODEL_FROM_DATABASE=Roland Corp. Boutique D-05
And after a reboot the ‘lsusb’ command now gives me:
Bus 007 Device 003: ID 0582:028e Roland Roland Corp. Boutique JX-08
Bus 007 Device 002: ID 0582:028c Roland Roland Corp. Boutique JD-08
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0582:01ff Roland Roland Corp. Boutique D-05
Still, Ardour keeps saying “Boutique MIDI 1 [1]” to [3].
Is there some way I can make this output more descriptive?
Is there some way our great development team could use strings like from ‘lsusb’?
We generally try to rely on the audio/MIDI device driver layer on any given OS to provide whatever naming exists. So for Linux, it’s really ALSA that you want to change.
Assuming you know a lot more about this than me, and given the fact that I am willing to create and submit a patch where needed, can you somehow point me in the right direction? Maybe repo and hopefully the dir or routine you call so I can pick it from there? Please? Pretty please?
Ardour (really everything audio on Linux like JACK, pipewire, etc eventually) uses ALSA [1] which completely abstracts soundcard I/O from the hardware and bus interface.
To list soundcards and their names run:
aplay -l
As for how ALSA names devices, I don’t know the details. The ardour code that queries the names can be found at [2], which is similar to what aplay -l does.
Well, I guess I can tweak my setup using asoundrc to show me nice names,
but, without trying to sound like a megalomaniac, I like to change it
‘for the world’.
Hence the search for where to start my work on this.
