Arch Linux

ee_yunn

Member

Registered: 2020-06-25

Posts: 8

[solved] Bluetooth speaker, sound gets choppy after pause

Setting the adapter to Discoverable always via blueman-manager fixed it. Temporarily Discoverable probably works too.

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MacBookAir7,2. The audio/speaker in question worked fine on this machine until a few weeks ago. It still works on macOS.

When playing audio (tried in firefox and vlc), if I pause for 1-2 minutes, when I press play the audio resumes unusably choppy. If I disconnect/reconnect the speaker it plays fine. I can leave audio running seemingly indefinitely with no issue--just happens if I pause.

Pavucontrol nor pasystray are showing anything noticeably different from before when it was working. Bluetoothctl and journalctl don't print any issue before/during/after as far as I can tell.

I saw this thread about seemingly similar issues, which suggest downgrading linux-firmware and switching to pipewire https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=263040
I tried both but no luck. Though my device isn't actually disconnecting. Also tried stopping/disabling TLP.

The speaker is a JBL Charge 4 if that matters.

Any thoughts what might be happening here or where to look for problems?

Last edited by ee_yunn (2021-09-03 01:17:30)

darkamster

Member

Registered: 2021-11-18

Posts: 2

Re: [solved] Bluetooth speaker, sound gets choppy after pause

With the same exact problem, on the same exact setup.

When audio is kept paused for a little while it starts late; a 3s gap of no audio after starting video. The audio then just starts at the point of video and sync perfectly.
This is the problem I'm facing. I changed the latency offset to 100ms which seems to solve another problem where if i moved the slider ahead the audio stopped. I've tried disabling TLP.

I'm a beginner here on the forum  and on Arch too.

ee_yunn

Member

Registered: 2020-06-25

Posts: 8

Re: [solved] Bluetooth speaker, sound gets choppy after pause

Are you still having the problem? Unchecking Use audio profile in Blueman-manager also helped

darkamster

Member

Registered: 2021-11-18

Posts: 2

Re: [solved] Bluetooth speaker, sound gets choppy after pause

Hey,
Sorry I couldn't reply sooner; have been very busy at work lately.

Thanks for the solution it worked. I also made more alsa-headroom and increased the buffer size too in the pipewire config file and in chrome browser.

But at the end it also boiled down to the fact that my headphones are pretty crappy