[Clam-devel] Re: Changing Sink/Sources portnames?

[David García Garzón]

If you have any opinion on this issue, please, keep Dirk in the CC, he hasn't 
got confirmation on the ml subscription yet. 

Also, in my previous mail, I wrote his address wrongly, use the one I CC in 
this one.


On Wednesday 13 May 2009 18:54:46 David García Garzón wrote:
> Dirk Griffioen who started working with us at Barcelona Media acustics
> group is hacking Audio Sinks and Sources to be multichannel, that is, being
> able to configure them so that they have n in/out ports. That could have
> several implications on the backends and in networks, so before introducing
> any backward incompatible change we would like to ask the list about them.
>
> What we had until now is:
> - Sources/Sinks configuration is empty.
> - Backend port names, are taken from Sources/Sinks processing name
> - Sources/Sinks ports are named AudioIn or AudioOut which are used just for
> network connections not for the backend.
>
> What we tried in a first approach is:
> - A new NSources/NSinks configuration parameter
> - Backend port names, are taken from Sources/Sinks processing+port names
> - Sources/Sinks ports are named 1,2,3,4...
> - If no NSources attribute is given, configuration is updated to have it
> set to 1 (so that you can edit it for old networks and on saving them it
> gets updated)
>
> Although the last step succeeds to configure old networks processings, old
> networks fail to load because the name '1' instead 'AudioOut/In' so we
> should use the clamrefactor script massively to adapt all the networks
> which i think is not good.
>
> Alternatively, we could consider single port sources/sinks an special case:
> - Processing port name being AudioIn/Out instead, this would solve old
> network loading
>
> Being an special case we might also add this:
> - Backend port name of a procesing with a single port being just the
> processing name without the port part, so, we won't get a meaningless '.1'
> on every port
>
> Another option is just doing that special case just whenever the NSources
> attribute is not present. In that case you won't be able to edit old
> network sink/sources configuration.
>
> One drawback of the solutions that change the name is that changing the
> name of a port without removing the existing connection  (as we try to do
> with most multichannels now) is not an obvious step now. A solution to that
> could be naming always AudioOut the first port and second and next
> AudioOut1, AudioOut2... And another solution would be being able to change
> the port name without disconnecting.
>
>
> David.