Home / ubuntu / Questions / 319871
Accepted
knb
Asked: 2013-07-15 01:04:53 +0800 CST

Bluetooth speaker: preferred mode "High fidelity playback" (A2DP) is not getting saved

  • 772

UPDATE Aug 2017: The solution marked as accepted by me apppears to have worked until Ubuntu 15.10. For 16.04+ choose one of the more recent solutions.

For 16.04+ the config file is /etc/bluetooth/main.conf NOT /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf .

I have a bluetooth speaker, Sony SRS-BTX300, which works in linux/ubuntu 13.04, but only after some fiddling. (Update Dec 2013: same problems remain in 13.10)

I have to set the preferred bandwidth mode to "High fidelity playback" (A2DP) each time after switching on the computer and reconnecting the speaker.

The mode resets itself to "telephony/duplex" (=low bandwidth) every time. It takes about 20 clicks to reset the speaker, (click through menu, disconnect, reconnects, select mode, test), and these are definitely too many clicks.

How can I make "A2DP" mode the default mode, an do so in a persistent manner?

A few screen shots will illustrate.

After choosing this menu by clicking on the bluetooth icon in the top panel in Unity...

Bluetooth Icon on panel

After setting up this...

A2DP

... the preferred mode will be reset to this after restarting/suspending the computer

Telephony Duplex

unity

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There's an option in /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf called aAutoConnect=truewhich is hashed out. 

    sudo nano /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf

    Delete the "#" at the start of the AutoConnect=true line

    I found enabling this option by removing the # and got things connecting properly with my bluetooth headset

    Restart the bluetooth service for the change to take effect:

    sudo service bluetooth restart
    • 30

  2. Add the following line to /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf: 

    [General]
Disable=Headset

    and then run this command:

    sudo service bluetooth restart

    Thread: (Natty) Connect only A2DP profile for bluetooth headset.

    • 29

  3. For those wondering, I found in Ubuntu 16.04 there is a slight difference to the answer: 

    sudo gedit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf

    And update the following line

    #AutoEnable=false

    to

    AutoEnable=true

    Followed by

    sudo service bluetooth restart

    For me, this defaulted the audio profile to A2DP Sink when connecting a bluetooth audio device.

    • 12

  4. I'm using Gnome3 and after some time my headset no longer connected at A2DP again. I had to stop Gnome creating a pulseaudio daemon by creating the file /var/lib/gdm3/.config/pulse/client.conf (as root) and adding the following lines to it:

    autospawn = no
daemon-binary = /bin/true

    Then set the owner to gdm:

    sudo chown gdm:gdm /var/lib/gdm3/.config/pulse/client.conf

    Then log off/on or look for the pulseaudio process running as the gdm user with ps aux | grep pulse

    (Trimmed) output looks like:

    gdm       2943  10616 ?        S<l  Sep01   0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio..

    Then kill the process with kill <pid> which for me was 2943

    Running bluetoothctl and connecting again, I could then run pacmd list-cards and find my device index: 2 and change to the a2dp_sink with pacmd set-card-profile 2 a2dp_sink.

    Finally working again!

    • 5

  5. In order to auto switch audio into A2DP bluetooth device when connected in Ubuntu 14.04 I followed the instructions from https://sandalov.org/blog/2146/ and it worked perfectly.

    Modify /etc/pulse/default.pa to automatically switch pulseaudio sink to Bluez:

    .ifexists module-bluetooth-discover.so
load-module module-bluetooth-discover
load-module module-switch-on-connect  # Add this
.endif

    Modify /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf to auto select A2DP profile (instead of HSP/HFP):

    [General]
Disable=Headset # Add this

    Apply changes:

    pulseaudio -k # Restarts pulseaudio
sudo service bluetooth restart # Restarts BT

    More info at: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bluetooth_headset

    • 2

  6. The real problem here is, that the default configuration allows only one profile per device. This can be changed by setting MultiProfile to single or multiple in /etc/bluetooth/main.conf. Restart the bluetooth daemon afterwards. You will then be able to change the profile on the fly.

    • 0