I have a new pair of headphones. They are OneOdio Studio Wireless Y80B.
The BT device on my Ubuntu machines sees the headphones and is able to pair with them. Blueman shows they are trusted.
However, when I turn them on and hit connect, they connect briefly (a second), and then disconnect. When that happens, the headphones go into discovery mode and I can't even turn them off anymore (I had to plug them to the charger and unplug them).
Things I have tried/checked:
- Headphones work on Mac, iphone, and Ubuntu 21.10 they work.
- Headphones work on Galaxy Tab 2 running Android 4.2.2.
- BT device is 4.0-compatible as requested by headphone manufacturer.
- Using Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 makes no difference.
- Using Ubuntu on mac, or Ubuntu on dell computer makes no difference.
- Updating bluez to 5.50 made no difference.
- Removing
/var/lib/bluetoothmade no difference. - Removing
~/.config/pulse, killing and restarting pulseaudio made no difference. - Resetting the device made no difference.
- Charging the headphones all the way made no difference.
I don't know even how to begin to debug such a problem.
This is not a diagnosis of what happened, or a proper solution, just a workaround.
Whatever the problem was, it was apparently solved in a future version of one of the packages involved. I don't know which individual package needed updating. The collection of bluez/pulseaudio-related packages was too large to build everything from source.
Updating my OS to Ubuntu 21.10 made the headphones work.