[SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

Arathis · 2010-09-09 20:42:09

Hi,
I bought a Plantronics Voyager 835 this week. After creating the following /etc/asound.conf

pcm.btheadset {
    type plug
    slave {
        pcm {
            type bluetooth
            device 00:19:7F:E9:90:80
            profile "auto"
        }   
    }   

    hint {
        show on
        description "BT Headset"
    }   
}

ctl.btheadset {
  type bluetooth
}

the headset works. aplay -L lists it and aplay -D btheadset, arecord -D btheadset and mplayer -ao alsa:device=btheadset work.

$ aplay -L
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
btheadset
    BT Headset
default:CARD=Intel
    HDA Intel, ALC268 Analog
    Default Audio Device
front:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
    HDA Intel, ALC268 Analog
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
    HDA Intel, ALC268 Analog
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
    HDA Intel, ALC268 Analog
    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
    HDA Intel, ALC268 Analog
    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
    HDA Intel, ALC268 Analog
    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=Intel,DEV=0
    HDA Intel, ALC268 Analog
    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
hdmi:CARD=HDMI
    HDA ATI HDMI, ATI HDMI
    HDMI Audio Output

The only problem is Skype, for which I primarily would use the device. Skype lists the headset, but when I select it sound still comes out of the laptop speakers and input via the headset wont't get me anything but silence.

Anybody got an idea how to configure the headset right so that Skype can use it? Pulseaudio is a last reasort, really.

Last edited by Arathis (2010-09-14 19:34:40)

Arathis · 2010-09-13 15:31:19

[push] nobody got an idea?

venky80 · 2010-09-13 15:55:21

bluetooth audio and mic is still a hell hole, there is just no easy way in linux to make it work. I am looking for solutions too.
Have you tried pulse audio? I am using KDE dont know if there is a QT front end to it.

Last edited by venky80 (2010-09-13 15:56:18)

Arathis · 2010-09-13 16:08:13

A not so easy way would be fine too.
I haven't tried pulse audio, just because it genereated more problems than it solved the last time I used it (about a year ago). Non the less, if there won't be any other suggestions I'll try it again I think.

DStein · 2010-09-14 03:15:56

Bluetooth audio seems to be forgotten in Linux. It's funny because in the hours and hours I've spent researching the topic in my failed attempts to get it working, I often come across mailing lists and forum postings from 2003, 2004 on the topic. And here we are years later no closer to a working solution. I did get A2DP working with PulseAudio once. Unfortunately all of my other sound completely went to hell. If I wanted to listen to music it involved 30 minutes of configuring and fiddling to get it going. Then when I wanted to go back to my laptop speakers it was another 30 minutes of the same stupidity.

It really really drives me nuts that this is a couple of mouse clicks and it works affair under XP. It also drives me nuts that this all works with a minimal amount of effort on my Android phone which from what I can tell is using bluez (perhaps heavily modified by Google). I'm still hopeful that further development of Bluedevil (a massive improvement over KBluetooth) and Phonon will make this work the way it should.

venky80 · 2010-09-14 03:18:33

yeah I am waiting for kmix to become compatible with bluedevil i think mandravia already does something like that but we will see the wait is on

ngoonee · 2010-09-14 04:29:28

When I got my free bluetooth headset from a competition I just paired it and it worked. Its one of the benefits of using Pulseaudio. Of course, noone ever hears that since its fashionable (or was) to diss pulseaudio for 'breaking ALSA which just works (tm)'. Not in the case of bluetooth, obviously.

Basically, just try pulseaudio. Its not without its faults, but there's no show-stoppers anymore, and you can get on with the listening (which is the whole point) rather than messing around with your .asoundrc

venky80 · 2010-09-14 16:47:43

ngoonee wrote:

When I got my free bluetooth headset from a competition I just paired it and it worked. Its one of the benefits of using Pulseaudio. Of course, noone ever hears that since its fashionable (or was) to diss pulseaudio for 'breaking ALSA which just works (tm)'. Not in the case of bluetooth, obviously.
Basically, just try pulseaudio. Its not without its faults, but there's no show-stoppers anymore, and you can get on with the listening (which is the whole point) rather than messing around with your .asoundrc

does it gets integrated with kmix

I have to do practically nothing to get ALSA working on my laptop, I mean nothing no editing text files nothing, just works out of box, are you saying pulseaudio is there for KDE? If so I will definitely give it a try...is there a qt frontend for the mixer?

Arathis · 2010-09-14 17:00:28

Okay, tried pulseaudio. And.. it works!
I configured it so that ALSA is still default, so I only run it, when I need it. Which means while running Skype mostly. Seems Ubuntu frightened me to much with bad pulseaudio integration in the old times
I'm happy now. Even BT-headset via pulseaudio and simultaniously running ALSA Sound on the pc-speakers works.

PS: Should I let the thread [unsolved] for you KDE guys?

venky80 · 2010-09-14 19:09:47

no you can mark it solved, I need to install the KDE packages listed in wiki and try pulseaudio.
Good to hear it works. So you are able to mic and headset with skype?

Arathis · 2010-09-14 19:33:50

yes I am. After understanding pulseaudio again ^^ (translation realated issues)

venky80 · 2010-09-15 00:41:47

does anyone know if kde packages are compatible with pulseaudio?

Xabre · 2010-09-15 01:37:18

@venky80
Just read http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pul … _4_and_Qt4 and all should be fine.

I've been using PA with KDE for a while and it runs just as it should.

Doctor Drive · 2010-09-15 09:07:43

Well... I use pulseaudio and it doesn't work.
Paired and connected, sound goes through speakers.

bluez 4.71-1
pulseaudio 0.9.21-11

Last edited by Doctor Drive (2010-09-15 09:11:32)

ngoonee · 2010-09-15 15:15:06

Did you finish reading the wiki? Sounds like you're expecting the computer to automatically decide to pipe sound through the input you want (computers don't read minds).

Try opening pavucontrol and moving the stream.

DStein · 2010-09-16 02:01:28

Well I spent an entire weekend on PulseAudio and could never get everything working properly. I'm one of those types of people who gets fixated on solving a problem and won't stop. Well Sunday evening rolled around and I didn't have much choice lol. One of my laptops has two hda controllers, an Intel and an Nvidia, and I have a feeling that added complexity could be part of the problems. But then again I have another laptop that is more "standard" and it has not proved any easier to deal with. At this point I feel like I know far more about ALSA and PulseAudio than I ever wanted to know but that still has not solved my problems. I tried the AUR pulse-enabled versions of different packages, differnt backends to Phonon, everything. And it seemed like the further I went the deeper a hole I dug myself into with Pulse until I finally just had to rip it out completely and revert back to the standard packages.

ngoonee · 2010-09-16 08:41:45

DStein wrote:

Well I spent an entire weekend on PulseAudio and could never get everything working properly. I'm one of those types of people who gets fixated on solving a problem and won't stop. Well Sunday evening rolled around and I didn't have much choice lol. One of my laptops has two hda controllers, an Intel and an Nvidia, and I have a feeling that added complexity could be part of the problems. But then again I have another laptop that is more "standard" and it has not proved any easier to deal with. At this point I feel like I know far more about ALSA and PulseAudio than I ever wanted to know but that still has not solved my problems. I tried the AUR pulse-enabled versions of different packages, differnt backends to Phonon, everything. And it seemed like the further I went the deeper a hole I dug myself into with Pulse until I finally just had to rip it out completely and revert back to the standard packages.

Start a forum topic detailing what you've done and what problems you're experiencing and someone (maybe me) will try to help.

Alternatively (and for better quality advise) just join the PA mailing list.

Its of course easier to rant on a thread (and not wrong since its on-topic). Getting some help would make you happy and not discourage others in future as well. Your choice

DStein · 2010-09-16 14:15:12

ngoonee wrote:

Start a forum topic detailing what you've done and what problems you're experiencing and someone (maybe me) will try to help.

I'm going to give it another go. This time I will document my steps so that I can provide some useful information. I honestly couldn't recall the entire process I went through over the two days.

ngoonee wrote:

Alternatively (and for better quality advise) just join the PA mailing list.

You know mailing lists are always something I never think about until they're pointed out to me. I'll be sure to add that one.

ngoonee wrote:

Its of course easier to rant on a thread (and not wrong since its on-topic). Getting some help would make you happy and not discourage others in future as well. Your choice

Indeed. This particular part is certainly a failing on me. Not too long ago I read an interview with the guy that created PulseAudio. He was asked about some of the criticisms of PulseAudio and the responses he gave put a bit of a chip on my shoulder. For those not familiar, his attitude in summary was that PulseAudio is just fine and if anybody has difficulties with it, that's due to their incompetence.

One the one hand I plead guilty. Incompetent as charged. If I had to guess I would probably place myself in the bottom 10% in terms of expertise in the regular visitors to these forums. On the other hand, following the Arch wiki, researching my problems here in the forums, and researching my problems through other avenues has nearly always led me to success. Not only led me to successfully getting something working, but usually doing so in short order. PulseAudio may be a great technical achievement, I don't really know for sure, but it is my opinion that something so fundamental as sound shouldn't be this difficult.

ngoonee · 2010-09-16 18:03:45

I'm not very high on the technical competence list myself, but I never had problems getting pulseaudio working, even with the first Ubuntu release (which everyone else complained about). I guess the way it works just fits into the way I think.

In any case, this is getting OT. Please continue in a new thread if you create one.

Doctor Drive · 2010-09-17 12:13:06

ngoonee wrote:

Did you finish reading the wiki? Sounds like you're expecting the computer to automatically decide to pipe sound through the input you want (computers don't read minds).

I thought it had to pipe it through headset automatically after connecting...

ngoonee wrote:

Try opening pavucontrol and moving the stream.

It works nicely. Thanks!

ngoonee · 2010-09-18 01:47:39

Doctor Drive wrote:

ngoonee wrote:
Did you finish reading the wiki? Sounds like you're expecting the computer to automatically decide to pipe sound through the input you want (computers don't read minds).
I thought it had to pipe it through headset automatically after connecting...
ngoonee wrote:
Try opening pavucontrol and moving the stream.
It works nicely. Thanks!

You're welcome. You're using Linux, 'automatically' is a four-letter word (most of the time). I don't want my system 'automatically' doing most stuff unless I've explicitly configured for it to do so. Down that road lies 'automatica updates' which translates to 'automatically downloading crap which I don't want and which may possibly spy on my computer for license infringement' blah blah blah.

Good that it works.

Doctor Drive · 2010-09-18 20:41:08

ngoonee wrote:

'automatically' is a four-letter word (most of the time). I don't want my system 'automatically' doing most stuff unless I've explicitly configured for it to do so. Down that road lies 'automatica updates' which translates to 'automatically downloading crap which I don't want and which may possibly spy on my computer for license infringement'
.

Sure. I agree.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-09 20:42:09

[SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#2 2010-09-13 15:31:19

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#3 2010-09-13 15:55:21

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#4 2010-09-13 16:08:13

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#5 2010-09-14 03:15:56

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#6 2010-09-14 03:18:33

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#7 2010-09-14 04:29:28

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#8 2010-09-14 16:47:43

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#9 2010-09-14 17:00:28

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#10 2010-09-14 19:09:47

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#11 2010-09-14 19:33:50

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#12 2010-09-15 00:41:47

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#13 2010-09-15 01:37:18

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#14 2010-09-15 09:07:43

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#15 2010-09-15 15:15:06

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#16 2010-09-16 02:01:28

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#17 2010-09-16 08:41:45

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#18 2010-09-16 14:15:12

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#19 2010-09-16 18:03:45

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#20 2010-09-17 12:13:06

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#21 2010-09-18 01:47:39

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

#22 2010-09-18 20:41:08

Re: [SOLVED] bluetooth headset with ALSA and Skype

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