Hello. My laptop’s headphone jack is a little wonky, so I use a 3.5mm to USB A adapter (run through a USB hub). Unfortunately, this causes my headset to be identified in GNOME Settings as a speaker output. This is obviously not a big deal (unless it changes how the audio is processed), but it’s a bit confusing.
I have an extension to rename audio devices in Quick Settings, but it doesn’t apply to GNOME Settings, nor to the OSD (when using volume keys) or the icon (which is a speaker instead of headphones).
I know this differentiation exists because when I plug the same headset into my laptop’s (wonky) 3.5mm jack, they appear as “Headphones”, with a Headphone icon.
I am also pretty sure this is not merely a case of the device names because of the aforementioned icons.
Screenshots: First two have headset plugged into adapter, second two have headset plugged into laptop.
You are dealing with 2 totally separate audio devices.
One is the built-in sound card which is able to recognize the difference between the plugged in headphones and the speakers (there is a hardware difference in the wiring).
The other is a usb device that is operated by the usb driver and the system is not able to detect what hardware may be attached on the other side so it is simply identified as a speaker.
I understand that; I want to manually set/override it to label anything attached to the usb device as “headphones”. The reason I referenced the built-in soundcard is to show that once a device is identified as “headphones,” GNOME displays it as such.
My point is that gnome only displays devices the way they are identified by the system. In this case the system identifies the generic usb device as speakers.
It may be possible to create a udev rule to properly identify the device but I am not enough of an expert there to guide you thru the creation of that rule.
It appears also possible to change device profile and descriptions through the ALSA configuration that is available in the WirePlumber configuration file. Udev rule can also be managed by the ALSA configuration there. The upstream WirePlumber documentation as above is worth having a look.
Device icon in ‘Sound outputs’ of the GNOME shell is another matter. I can’t find how device icon (adwaita-icon-theme) is mapped to device description.
