Pulseaudio won't "let go" off my headphones
Summary
I'm not entirely sure if it's on the pulseaudio side, or bluetooth side (or something in the middle?).
My headphones allow connecting up to two devices at once. When one device plays sounds, the headphones stick to it ("foreground device"), and keep the second device muted ("background device").
ONLY if the foreground device is silent, does it go back to being background again. It would seem that the constraints of the implementation are such that:
- Always zero or one device is foreground.
- Always one or more devices are background.
- Foreground can only be relinquished by devices by being silent.
This is "magic" done by the headphones themselves, and works fine 100% across iPhone/iPad.
However, on Linux I've noticed once my laptop becomes the foreground device, it never switches back. So if I have silence on both the laptop and phone, and play a video on my phone, the headphones are silent.
This continues until I manually disconnect the headphones from the laptop.
I suspect that what I perceive as "silence" may also involve switching from Bluetooth to BluetoothLE very aggressively on other devices, but I'm not just speculating here.
I'm happy to try figuring out if other factors are involved.
environment
Attaching output of pa-info > pa-info.log 2> pa-info.err
:
Without the headphones plugged in: pa-info.log pa-info.err
With the headphones plugged in: pa-info.log pa-info.err
Steps to reproduce
I guess you're going to need a phone and bluetooth headsets that support more than one connection at once for this. Using Bose QC35 IIs here.
- Connect headphones to laptop and phone.
- [On laptop] Play a sound, whatever, anything.
- [On laptop] Stop playback
- [On phone] Play audio. (No sound!?)
- Disconnect laptop.
- [On phone] Play audio. (It works!)
What is the current bug behavior?
Step 4: no sound.
What is the expected correct behavior?
Step 4: should have sound.