Sound Switcher Indicator‣2.1.0

I’ve been able to pay a bit more attention to the Sound Switcher Indicator and implement some of the long asked-for features.

What’s new

• Version 2.1.0 (2016-09-29)

  • Added support for configuration file (#30).
    See below for details about its format.
  • The sections Inputs and Outputs can be hidden now (#32).
  • Device and port names can now be configured (#31).
  • Unused ports can be blacklisted (hidden from the menu) (#13).
  • French translation added.

• Version 2.0.2 (2016-09-28)

  • The menu can now be localised (#28).
    I’ve made use of the standard localisation library GNU gettext. New translations can easily be added as .po files, and merged from pull requests.
  • Russian and Spanish translations added.
  • Added a manpage (#24).
    It can be viewed using man indicator-sound-switcher (there’s not much information yet, but at least it’s there).

The configuration file

The configuration file, by default ~/.config/indicator-sound-switcher.json, must be in the JSON format. The file is optional, and so are all its values.

Here’s a sample config taken from the README:

{
    "show_inputs": false,
    "show_outputs": true,
    "devices": {
        "alsa_card.pci-0000_00_06.0": {
            "name": "My lovely card",
            "ports": {
                "analog-output-speaker": "Boombox",
                "iec958-stereo-output": false
            }
        },
        "alsa_card.pci-0000_01_00.1": {
            "name": "HDMI Audio"
        }
    }
}

According to the above:

• The Inputs section will be hidden.
• The device alsa_card.pci-0000_00_06.0 will be referred to as My lovely card. Its speaker output will be called Boombox, and its S/PDIF port will be hidden from the menu.
• The device alsa_card.pci-0000_01_00.1 will be named HDMI Audio in the menu items.
• For the rest all the defaults will apply.

Device and port names can be found in the console output of:

indicator-sound-switcher -vv

For example:

DEB   + Card[0] added: `alsa_card.pci-0000_00_08.0`
 ...
DEB     + Card port added: `analog-input-mic` (`Microphone`); priority: 8700; direction: 2; available: Yes
 ...
DEB     + Card port added: `iec958-stereo-output` (`Digital Output (S/PDIF)`); priority: 0; direction: 1; available: Yes
 ...