PulseAudio fails to detect bluetooth speakers
Submitted by Stefan Nagy
Assigned to pul..@..op.org
Description
Created attachment 121606 log file (no workaround)
After pairing bluetooth speakers with my notebook I never had any problems connecting them, but they don't appear in GNOME audio settings (or pavucontrol) as audio output device.
The first workaround I used for months was to restart bluetoothd before connecting the speakers – then it worked, after connecting the speakers they were listed in GNOME audio settings. Several weeks ago I read that this problem had something to do with GDM capturing the A2DP sink on session start, so to prevent GDM from doing that I followed a debian wiki entry [1]. This second workaround was more convenient, now every time I connected my speakers they were listed in GNOME audio settings immediately. Some days ago I read that it wasn't necessary to prevent GDM from starting pulseaudio. The only thing I'd have to do is to prevent module-bluetooth-discover from being started by default but to start it with X11 [2]. This third workaround works for me too.
As I understand it, the pulseaudio module module-bluetooth-discover is responsible for detecting available bluetooth audio devices using BlueZ. GDM starts a pulseaudio process before the user does and module-bluetooth-discover in fact works - but for the GDM pulseaudio process, not the one that gets started with X11.
I verified that by connecting my bluetooth speakers in GDM (I can connect my speakers to the last used paired device by pushing a button). After connecting the speakers, GDM used them for audio output immediately. After that I started a GNOME session and my bluetooth speakers were not used as audio output and not listed in GNOME audio settings as audio output device. When I switched to the virtual console running GDM my bluetooth speakers were still used for audio output.
I'll attach three pulseaudio log files: pulse.log is without any workaround, pulse-workaround2 with the workaround described in the debian wiki [1], and pulse-workaround3 with the workaround described in Comment 1 of the gnome-bluetooth bug report [2].
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/BluetoothUser/a2dp#Troubleshooting [2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=749208#c1
Attachment 121606, "log file (no workaround)":
pulse.log