Audio goes to speakers/headphones but not to bluetooth device

[xzinik]

I’m having a weird problem where all audio goes to the integrated speakers when trying to use any bluetooth audio device, i’ve tried with 3 bluetooth(1 borrowed) headsets and 1 wired(borrowed)

No mater what bluetooth device I use and set as default with gnome-control-center the audio will always go to the speakers, unless I plug in the wired headphones to the 3.5mm jack, the all the audio goes to the wired headphones again it doesn’t matter what bluetooth device I’ve selected, it goes to the wired headphones

the bluetooth headphones work ok when connected to another laptop or a phone, so they are not faulty

I’ve managed to play music with vlc and selecting the desired bluetooth device as output for audio, and when i set the default device the same as the one on vlc i can control the volume for that device, but all other audio goes to the speakers/wired headphones

i’ve tried un-pairing and re-pairing the headphones and rebooting the system and no luck

on alsa mixer on the default sound card (- (default)) i can control the volume (when playing )but i don’t think it as anything to do with my problem

the “default:0 HDA nvidia” does nothing

and the “default:1 HD audio generic” controls the speakers/wired headset

I think in alsamixer should appear the bluetooth headsets, but no clue if I’m right or not

usually i’m able to figure out what is wrong and fix it or know what to search to fix it, but now i don’t even know what is broken, last update was only for the “system-monitoring-center” from the aur, i’m trying to see how that might have broken my audio, before that the last update was on Friday morning, and had no problems all day

as a test i also connected my phone via bluetooth and use my laptop as an audio sink, and it works okay, but the audio can only go to the speakers/wired headset, some time ago i used to play music on my phone to the laptop and my laptop to the bluetooth headphones with no problem, but as i said, today no luck with that

[nikgnomic]

I think in alsamixer should appear the bluetooth headsets, but no clue if I’m right or not

Manjaro (like most Linux distributions) uses BlueZ for Bluetooth audio devices rather than ALSA

No mater what bluetooth device I use and set as default with gnome-control-center the audio will always go to the speakers, unless I plug in the wired headphones to the 3.5mm jack, the all the audio goes to the wired headphones again

Comment suggests that PulseAudio default sink is set to use onboard audio card rather than Bluetooth device

Use this command to show names of all audio sinks available in PulseAudio and name of default sink

pactl list sinks short; pactl info | grep Sink

[xzinik]

Thanks, I did not knew that, first time I delve into audio and bluetooth in linux

this is the output of the command,

0	alsa_output.pci-0000_05_00.6.analog-stereo	module-alsa-card.c	s16le 2ch 44100Hz	SUSPENDED
1	bluez_sink.5C_FB_7C_F4_6B_DE.a2dp_sink	module-bluez5-device.c	s16le 2ch 44100Hz	SUSPENDED
Default Sink: bluez_sink.5C_FB_7C_F4_6B_DE.a2dp_sink

I’ve been thinkering a bit and found out that an old user account that i had for testing things has no problem at all to send audio to my bluetooth headset, after that i made a new one and it also does not have any problem, so I dont think its system wide issue, the other accounts returned the exact same output for the command

now i’m gonna try to find if there is any bluez config file for my user that is causing the issue

[nikgnomic]

If there is only one user account not respecting setting for default-sink it may have accumulated some conflicting user configurations in PulseAudio settings databases

One simple method to reset PulseAudio databases is to delete the databases and cookie in user home folder and restart PulseAudio

rm ~/.config/pulse/*.tdb ~/.config/pulse/cookie; systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

I also suggest using this command to ensure the default-sink is set to the Bluetooth headset

pacmd set-default-sink bluez_sink.5C_FB_7C_F4_6B_DE.a2dp_sink

If that does not work as expected, use this command to suspend the ALSA sink when using Bluetooth headset:

pactl suspend-sink alsa_output.pci-0000_05_00.6.analog-stereo 1

and this command to de-suspend the sink to use onboard audio

pactl suspend-sink alsa_output.pci-0000_05_00.6.analog-stereo 0

[xzinik]

Thank you, that first option worked wonders, and i’m gonna keep the other ones at hand in case anything else happens, but now at least i have a first few steps to follow in case I stumble again on this or something similar

As far as i can remember this is the first time in years that something breaks without me actively doing something like updating or changing some configs

and again, thank you <3