Not from the USB side, I don't think. There's no string field in any of the MIDI descriptors

Oh actually I am wrong, there is an interface string descriptor index (iInteface) that's currently not passed through by the driver in this call:
https://github.com/micropython/micropython-lib/blob/master/micropython/usb/usb-device-midi/usb/device/midi.py#L174

You could try patching the desc_cfg() function in midi.py to something like:

    def desc_cfg(self, desc, itf_num, ep_num, strs):
        # Start by registering a USB Audio Control interface, that is required to point to the
        # actual MIDI interface
        desc.interface(itf_num, 0, _INTERFACE_CLASS_AUDIO, _INTERFACE_SUBCLASS_AUDIO_CONTROL, iInterface=len(strs))
        strs.append("interface string")

If this works then we could add an optional interface_name argument to the MIDIInterface class, that passes through here.

A couple of caveats here that have been confusing to CircuitPython users, where we have a MIDI renaming capability:

1. The device and jack names on macOS are very sticky. They get cached the first time the device is seen, and subsequent changes are ignored. You have to delete the device to get new names to show up. This caching may also be true on Windows.
2. On Windows, either the interface name or the jack names are not very visible (I forget which), and don't show up in Device Manager.

Thanks for the heads up, @dhalbert. If there is a jack name capability in USB MIDI then my first reply is wrong on two counts! Apologies, @HLammers. I'll try and dig into this more when I have some time.

See https://docs.circuitpython.org/en/latest/shared-bindings/usb_midi/index.html#usb_midi.set_names. Also, we recently found this gotcha on Windows, that jack names longer than 31 chars break something, even though that's not inherently a USB length restriction that we know of: adafruit#9871

Thanks @projectgus and @dhalbert!

I tried patching the desc_cfg() function in midi.py to:

        # Start by registering a USB Audio Control interface, that is required to point to the
        # actual MIDI interface
        global interface_count
        interface_count += 1
        desc.interface(itf_num, 0, _INTERFACE_CLASS_AUDIO, _INTERFACE_SUBCLASS_AUDIO_CONTROL, iInterface=len(strs))
        strs.append(f'interface {interface_count}')

But now it creates three MIDI ports, each called ‘Interface 6’, while it should be ‘Interface 4’, ‘Interface 5’ and ‘Interface 6’ (numbers 1 to 3 are taken by the dummy calls to desc_cfg).

I do not have time now to do more testing to try to figure out why it refers each time to the last string. I guess the clue to that must be in core.pi. The annoying thing is that I’m using VS Code (on Windows 11), with the MicroPico extension, which doesn’t reconnect to the REPL after self.active(True) is called in _Device.init - which makes debugging very hard (I guess that’s an issue to raise in the MicroPico repository).

@HLammers I haven't tried the VSCode plugin, but unfortunately I'm guessing "no" - the USB serial device will appear to disconnect and reconnect whenever the board soft resets and the host program has to manage this.

(We are in the process of getting support for automatic reconnections in mpremote via #17322 - once this lands it might be a convenient example for other programs to emulate, but they'll need to implement support themselves.)