Hello, I have been avoiding pulseaudio like the plague so far. Back when I found my onboard sound card is not going to work with ALSA I tried various sound systems including pulse as workaround only to find that they all kind of suck. Now I am looking into bluetooth sound and it turns out that the only way to get bluetooth sound without porting a driver is a pulseaudio module. So I rolled up mu sleeves, got an USB sound card that works with everything (except oss), exorcised OSS4, installed ALSA, bluez and pulse ... and after fiddling with some configuration files I got my bluetooth headphones to connect. The fiddling was probably required because I had some obsolete configuration around from back when I tried bluetooth for connecting my phone. So now I have presumably everything running 'within given parameters'. First thing is that even after the headphones are paired and trusted they do not automatically connect when powered on. This does not seem to work 100% on my Chinese tablet either so it's possibly a limitation of Bluetooth and not something pulseaudio itself is responsible for. When I have the headphones connected I get multitude of problems. First off, the bluetooth card has priority 0 which means that so long as there is *any* other sound card the bluetooth one is *not* going to get used. I tried grepping for card priority a bit but did not find how it is set. Fortunately, there is default sink setting which sticks for a while so if you go with the headphones to another room and come back quickly they might even reconnect automagically and keep working. When you have playback working there are multiple problems still. A cosmetic issue is moderately loud pop in the speakers when playback starts or is unpaused. I heard this also when I connected my headphones to the Chinese tablet so assumed this might be power management artifact with the speakers being disconnected when not used. Then I heard this with the USB sound card when I gave up on getting the bluetooth sound working anytime soon. So this does not seem really caused by pulseaudio. Interestingly, leaving the pavucontrol open avoids this problem as the sound card is never released. One real problem (probably also worked around by running pavucontrol at all times) is that the card gets released and disconnected every time playback in media application gets paused. For the bluetooth speakers this means that pausing playback a few times is going to get your speakers disconnected and you will have to go through BT reconnection dances to get sound again. I am not really sure what happens here. During the first test I took bluetooth headphones, set them as default sink, started playback, and got sound. Turned off BT headphones, paused and restarted playback, and got sound on wired card. Turned on BT headphones, paused and restarted playback, got sound on BT. But later I had BT headphones on and pausing and restarting playback would lose sound in them permanently after a few times. Even had to replug my USB sound card as it would play only mono with no sound on the right channel after trying to get BT connected many times. The other real problem are BT reconnection dances. I went through multiple versions of pulse (5.0/7.0/7.1) and bluez(5.23/5.33/5.36) in an attempt to get this working properly but it's only getting worse. Initially if the BT device was off or out of range for an extended period of time you would have to open blueman-manager, select the device, and select audio sink feature. The device would then reconnect and everything would work. When connected the device would have red marks on the feature selections indicating it is already connected. Later I would run into the problem that the device would have these red marks but the audio would not work - usually after pausing playback a few times. This would be solved disconnecting and reconnecting the device. I powered off the device to trigger a reconnect. Even more problematic state appeared with the latest version of bluez and pulse - after pause sound would not work but applications trying to use pulse would not fail - they would lock up instead. Selecting the a2dp sink feature would fail in the blueman-manager menu saying something about error with initializing that feature in the blueman status bar. The headset feature can still be selected but since it's not supported connecting it has no effect. Restarting the bluetooth and pulse services is required to fix this. Since the a2dp sink is implemented by bluez and pulse together I have no idea on which side the issue would be. I am using Debian. If you have some idea how to make pulse work with bluetooth cards I would like to hear that. Since it's becoming a 'Linux desktop standard' it would better be a working one. Thanks Michal
