Make device name matching more flexible

[thrakotool]

I understand this has more to do with the hardware and the win audio engine in general, but I was hoping for a witty solution on the FlexASIO side.
My device (Steinberg MR816) is defined in WASAPI as "Speakers (8- Yamaha Steinberg FW WDM Audio)" at 44.1kHz, but when I change the sample rate to 48kHz - the name changes to "Speakers (9- Yamaha Steinberg FW WDM Audio)". Obviously, FlexASIO fails to find it with the new name = no output at 48kHz.
Same thing with DirectSound.

In WDM-KS the name is consistent at all sample rates, but the sound is distorted at any buffer size (WASAPI works great at 1024, WDM-KS doesn't).

Is it possible to specify different device names for different sample rates in the .toml file? Or edit some other setting somewhere to keep the whole thing consistent.

[dechamps]

when I change the sample rate to 48kHz - the name changes

That's surprising. What do you mean by "change the sample rate"? I've never seen a device change its name just because its sample rate was changed in the Windows sound control panel settings.

[thrakotool]

The sample rate options are in its own software - here's a screenshot of the panel from Steinberg's website:
Yamaha Steinberg FW control panel

I think MR816 re-initializes every time its sample rate gets changed, judging by its LED behavior. So the name change happens after re-initialization, and the names are consistent with the chosen sample rate.

However, when I was using the inbuilt 1394 port on my previous motherboard, FlexASIOGui showed "Speakers (4 - Yamaha Steinberg FW WDM Audio)" at 44.1kHz and "Speakers (5 - Yamaha Steinberg FW WDM Audio)" at 48kHz.
With my new motherboard I have to use a dedicated PCIe 1394 card, which surprisingly resulted in new names: "Speakers (8-..." and "Speakers (9-..." respectively. I'm not sure what to make of it.

[dechamps]

That's because every time you do this, Windows sees a new audio device and thus gives it a different name. It doesn't know that it's the same device. That's a hardware/driver limitation of your specific device.

Sadly FlexASIO doesn't provide a way to do "fuzzy matching" on device names. I'll see if I can implement something like this in the future.

[thrakotool]

Thank you, that would be life saving! FlexASIO is amazing for what it does, but sadly I have to switch between sample rates daily for my work, so this is a critical issue for my workflow.
Just a wild guess, but I noticed that PortAudioDevices shows the same Device Index despite the name changes - so if technically possible, it might be feasible to just use the index instead of the name.

[dechamps]

The issue with the index is that it can change every time a device is added or removed. The best option is probably to allow some kind of glob/regex/partial matching of the device name.

[dechamps]

This is now implemented in FlexASIO 1.8 as the deviceRegex option. This will allow you to write the following:

[output]
deviceRegex = '^Speakers \(.*Yamaha Steinberg FW WDM Audio\)$'

Which will match any device named Speakers (xxxYamaha Steinberg FW WDM Audio), where xxx can be anything.