Sound plays out speakers, not Bluetooth headset

English Hardware
1

I’ve got a Tumbleweed box that I recently bought a Bluetooth dongle / USB adapter for so that I could play audio through my wireless ear buds. However, no matter what I do, the audio plays through the speakers. Outputs in Plasma show “line out” and “headphones” (this machine is a Dell OptiPlex 7070 and happens to have a 3.5mm headphone jack). Nowhere is there an option in Plasma’s sound settings to output to the Bluetooth headset.

The USB adapter/dongle is a Kinivo which was referenced in several Linux websites to have good Linux support. The headset pairs correctly to the computer – everything looks good, except audio doesn’t play over the headset – it plays through the external speakers no matter what I do.

I have Tumbleweed build 20221018. I’m happy to provide additional info – just let me know what info I need to provide.

Thanks all

2

Assuming you are using KDE, is the headset visible using the Bluetooth “icon” in the right of the status bar?

https://paste.opensuse.org/view/raw/4857381

If so, if the device also enabled, see the Audio “icon” also in the status bar

https://paste.opensuse.org/view/raw/64642435

3

I have the same problem. The headset connects via bluetooth and shows in the kde applet as shown above. However, it does not appear in pulseaudio liststings (applet, or pavucontrol). When monitoring the system-log with journalctl nothing is printed on connecting the headphones. The same headset works under 15.3 although connecting to different hardware.

This is on Tumbleweed 20221108.

4

Adding a bit more information, here is the output from pulseaudio as started from the terminal

D: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: Properties changed in device /org/bluez/hci0/dev_20_16_03_19_CA_BD 
D: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: Unknown interface org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable found, skipping 
D: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: Parsing remote endpoint /org/bluez/hci0/dev_20_16_03_19_CA_BD/sep1 
D: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: Unknown interface org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties found, skipping 
D: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: Unknown interface org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable found, skipping 
D: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: Unknown interface org.bluez.MediaTransport1 found, skipping 
D: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: Unknown interface org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties found, skipping 
D: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: Properties changed in transport /org/bluez/hci0/dev_20_16_03_19_CA_BD/sep1/fd6
5

It should show like this in pavucontrol if it is connected.
https://susepaste.org/images/49075753.jpeg

My audio mixer has a chooser also to which audio source I want to listen.
https://susepaste.org/images/42173659.jpeg
IQPOD is a bluetooth earphone.

6

Thank you for the information. In my case, the device does not show up in pavucontrol nor in the audio mixer widget. The device does show up in the bluetooth widget and bluetoothctl shows the devices as paird/connected/trusted. A bluetooth keyboard works without problems and the headset works on a 15.3 installation (albeight connected to a different type of bluetooth controller).

7

Hi,
It happens to me sometimes that it is connected but doesn’t work.
The culprit is my tv monitor and my iphone trying also to connect to the same bluetooth.
What I do is forget the bluetooth first on all my devices. Try to remove your bluetooth speaker first from your machine. When I say remove it means forget device like in iphone.
and reconnect/pair and see if it will show up in pavucontrol. When it does show select it as your audio source when you play music or
stream from your browser.

8

Thank you. I have tried this but unfortunately this does not resolve the problem.

9

@conrad, @marel could you please execute


systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio
pulseaudio -vvvvv

then wait until output has calmed down, then connect your headset and send the output here?
Thank you very much in advance.

10

Please take a look at this thread.
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/577948-Targus-bluetooth-dongle-shows-to-be-working-but-will-not-connectI recall had the same problem before without obex installing it had my bluetooth work again.

11

This is most likely not a bluetooth problem. A bluetooth keyboard is working without problems. The headsets do connect. It is pulseaudio not recognizing the devices.

12

This is most likely not a bluetooth problem. A bluetooth keyboard works fine and the headsets do connect. It is pulseaudio seeing but not connecting the headsets.

13

Just to be clear, I have no problem, but maybe you want to have such a log as reference?

Anyhow you can find it here: SUSE Paste
It has the BT Headset connecting and then audio starting to play.

Probably good if you can share the same log.

14

Thank you very much.

In the meantime I found out by chance that when I turn on the headset before logging in, pulseaudio does recognize the headset and everything works as expected. This is a workable work around. I discovered old threads (> 5yrs) old mentioning very similar problems. Back then, the loading of some pulseaudio plugins had to be deferred.

This definitely seems to be a race condition to me. I will compare your output with what I have to hopefully get more insight.

15

As a follow-up. There is some strange interaction with the KDE system at large. When I turn the headset on before logging in, the taskbar shows up with delay (~ 1 min) or not at all. When turning the headset off, logging out (ctrl-alt-del) and logging in againg, the taskbar show up again and the headset works. I will report back on how stable this behavior is.

Another observation: I use a rotated screen and the proper rotation is only established a few seconds after logging in. If I turn the headset on before logging in, the rotation is directly applied (the opensuse bulb shows the proper rotation already).

16

Nice you found a work-around and got a better hand at the problem.

My take from you observation that things work before logging in and do not work after logging in is that it might also be due to an illegal/corrupted configuration setting.

Can you create a new user and check if that has the problem or not?

If that new user does not have the problem, time to clean up your pulseaudio configuration files.

17

@marel: I followed your suggestion but the problem persists for a new user.

18

Bluetooth audio devices are recognised but are not available as speakers / headsets. This seems to be a problem with PulseAudio. Since the 20220708 openSUSE Tumbleweed release, new installations use PipeWire as the default audio engine instead of PulseAudio. It is better to use Pipewire instead. PipeWire is available from the main openSUSE repositories as pipewire. It’s installed by default without audio support in openSUSE Leap. In order to enable it and use PipeWire as an audio engine (replacing PulseAudio, which is the default audio engine in Leap) the pipewire-pulseaudio package needs to be installed. To install it use:

zypper in pipewire-pulseaudio

See also openSUSE:Pipewire - openSUSE Wiki

3 Likes
19

This solved my problems thanks. I had to reboot though.

1 Like
20

Thanks! This fixed the issues I was having on my Leap 15.5 and Bose QC35II