I have a little Broadcom (BCM20702A0) Bluetooth 4.0 USB dongle that I’ve paired with an Amazon-branded Bluetooth audio receiver connected to some speakers on the other side of the room. When things work, they cough work. But things are flaky following a reset:
I hear a series of ascending or descending beeps on those speakers when the BT connection is established or severed. When I reboot my machine, obviously the BT connection is severed and I hear descending beeps. Following the reboot, when I log in, I hear the ascending beeps an established connection. But…audio over BT doesn’t work.
If I go to the Gnome Settings::Bluetooth tab, I see “Amazon_Audio Connected”. That’s what I would expect since the ascending beeps indicated that the devices are connected.
If I go to Settings::Sound, however, the only output device is the built-in audio on my motherboard that isn’t connected to anything.
If at this point I manually restart the bluetooth service via “systemctl restart bluetooth.service”, the Settings::Sound dialog shows the Amazon_Audio audio device as the selected output device. And the speakers start to work.
This seems like a race condition somewhere during system startup or login but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Obviously the BT connection gets established and the system’s bluetooth service reports the Amazon device. But Pulseaudio doesn’t recognize the output device until after the bluetooth service gets restarted. Does Pulseaudio start before bluetooth.service?