Arch Linux

radumitrescu

Member

Registered: 2022-05-17

Posts: 58

Bluetooth speaker, although connected, doesn't work.

My bluetooth speaker connects just fine, it's listed correctly as the Output Device and the configuration shows HiFi Playback (A2DP Sink), as far as appearances go, everything looks fine, however sound still comes out of the laptop speakers and not the bluetooth speaker.

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Romanian street photographer with a passion for vintage lenses, beer and linux. Somewhat of a nerd.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,940

Re: Bluetooth speaker, although connected, doesn't work.

You need to configure where applications play to in e.g. pavucontrol or with

pactl move-sink-input $sinkindex $sink

where $sinkindex is the id of the client from pactl list sink-inputs and $sink the index/name of the bluetooth sink from pactl list sinks

You can technically configure autoswitching  if that's what you want by loading module-switch-on-connect in /etc/pulse/default.pa somewhere after the if... udev-detect block if you're using pulseaudio or by uncommenting the call to pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect to the context section of your /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf (or rather do a copy for that file under /etc/pipewire to not clash with system updates

radumitrescu

Member

Registered: 2022-05-17

Posts: 58

Re: Bluetooth speaker, although connected, doesn't work.

You need to configure where applications play to in e.g. pavucontrol

OK, setting my BT speaker manually in pavucontrol works, but it's strange because I didn't need to do that before a couple of days ago, it would just automatically work when I connected the speaker.

/etc/pulse/default.pa somewhere after the if... udev-detect block if you're using pulseaudio

If I'm not missing anything /etc/pulse/default.pa seems to be configured correctly, and this all used to work well until a couple of days ago, when out of the blue it stopped working.

### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
load-module module-udev-detect
.else
### Use the static hardware detection module (for systems that lack udev support)
load-module module-detect
.endif

### Automatically connect sink and source if JACK server is present
.ifexists module-jackdbus-detect.so
.nofail
load-module module-jackdbus-detect channels=2
.fail
.endif

### Automatically load driver modules for Bluetooth hardware
.ifexists module-bluetooth-policy.so
load-module module-bluetooth-policy
.endif

.ifexists module-bluetooth-discover.so
load-module module-bluetooth-discover
.endif

Last edited by radumitrescu (2022-06-08 04:24:48)

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Romanian street photographer with a passion for vintage lenses, beer and linux. Somewhat of a nerd.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,940

Re: Bluetooth speaker, although connected, doesn't work.

Generally for this to actually work it was always required to have

load-module module-switch-on-connect

somewhere (towards the end...) of the file. Did you maybe override an existing file with the defaults when pulseaudio 16 got released (or maybe this is an actual bug in the new release, but generally you will want that module loaded if you expect this behaviour)? Also more generally, make sure you aren't running into the conflicts that can arise when having wireplumber and pulse active: https://archlinux.org/news/undone-repla … replumber/

Last edited by V1del (2022-06-08 08:23:47)

radumitrescu

Member

Registered: 2022-05-17

Posts: 58

Re: Bluetooth speaker, although connected, doesn't work.

Generally for this to actually work it was always required to have

load-module module-switch-on-connect

somewhere (towards the end...) of the file.

I tried addint that line like:

### Automatically load driver modules for Bluetooth hardware
.ifexists module-bluetooth-policy.so
load-module module-bluetooth-policy
.endif

.ifexists module-bluetooth-discover.so
load-module module-bluetooth-discover
load-module module-switch-on-connect
.endif

then did pulseaudio -k and pulseaudio -D but nothing changed.

Did you maybe override an existing file with the defaults when pulseaudio 16 got released

If I did overwrite any files, I did it unwillingly and unknowingly just by taking updates...

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Romanian street photographer with a passion for vintage lenses, beer and linux. Somewhat of a nerd.