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siride
Asked: 2020-04-28 13:46:49 +0800 CST

Ubuntu 20.04 no sound out of Bluetooth headphones

  • 772

This is on a machine I upgraded from 18.04 to 20.04 a few days ago. No issues at all getting sound to play out of headphones on 18.04.

The headphones are paired with Bluetooth. I unpaired and repaired them just to be sure. The settings panel for sound has them as an output option and I can select it without issue. However, no sound ever comes out of the headphones. I've even adjusted the volume both in the settings panel, in alsamixer and in pavucontrol. Nothing changes.

I see no errors in the bluetooth service log.

Output of:

{ sudo lshw | grep product | head -n1 && sudo lspci -knn | grep Net -A3 && lsusb -v; } >output.txt 2>&1

https://pastebin.com/VJ5EQcFb

sound pulseaudio bluetooth 20.04

7 Answers

  1. This is a bug (pulseaudio #832, launchpad #1866194) with new version of pulseaudio in Ubuntu 20.04 where old config values have not been cleared and it is not routing to the correct device. The solution is to delete the old config and restart pulseaudio:

    Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the following commands:

    mv ~/.config/pulse/ ~/.config/pulse.old
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

    A pulseaudio fix #298 is currently in progress.

    • 171

  2. It's not a fix, only a workaround; I installed pulse audio volume control utility:

    sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

    The problem seems that Ubuntu doesn't change all the audio sources to the Bluetooth device, in the volume control utility you will see this more clearly, the Bluetooth device is connected but not used as audio playback device. (see pulse audio volume control utility).

    Find your audio source; mine was firefox since I was playing some videos from YouTube, and select the Bluetooth playback device (mine was a Xiaomi speaker) (XMFHZ02) and change it. Your device should start outputting audio.

    Hope it helps

    • 30

  3. I reinstalled, and it worked, without having to reboot:

    sudo apt install --reinstall pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-bluetooth

    Then re-connect the Bluetooth headset

    • 17

  4. I had a similar problem, this worked for me.

    Install Pulse Audio with Bluetooth module:

    $ sudo apt install pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-bluetooth

    Open it and select the desired output channel in Playback tab.

    The tool allows tweaking also other sound settings.

    • 1

  5. Option #3 as described here worked for me.

    Additionally info:

    • I upgraded from 19.10 to 20.04

    • When adjusting the volume via the volume up/down hotkeys the feedback sound would play through the headphones. They were also detected in the settings. The audio stream from other applications would still play through the laptop speakers.

    • The packages @Mirek mentioned, pulseaudio and pulseaudio-module-bluetooth were already installed

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  6. If you are using Ubuntu 20.04, I would recommend to replace Pulseaudio with Pipewire. It will work with all your apps, because it aims to replace both PulseAudio and JACK, by providing a PulseAudio-compatible server implementation and ABI-compatible libraries for JACK clients..

    I run Ubuntu 20.04.3 and Pipewire runs very stable so far. My bluetooth headset works with Microsoft Teams now. In my case I run Bitwig, Spotify, Youtube etc. at the same time and it just works with every output device (Bluetooth Headset, RME Audio Interface, internal speakers).

    I post the link for the installation steps, which worked for me: Replacing Pulseaudio with Pipewire in Ubuntu 20.04

    • 1

  7. After a few reboots, it seems to be working. I'm not sure specifically which thing worked, but here are the things I tried.

    1. Everything in this answer: Ubuntu 18.04: Audio doesn't work unless I switch between outputs
    2. Un-pairing and re-pairing my BlueTooth headphones. I am using blueman-applet.
    3. Muting and unmuting the sound in AlsaMixer across all devices.
    4. Selecting, deselecting and reselecting the headphones output in the configuration panel for sound.
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