Problem with pulseaudio and bluetooth audio

I have posted about using pulseaudio in the new Dunfell-series of easyOS:

https://bkhome.org/news/202010/easyos-dunfell-series-using-pulseaudio.html

The primary motivation was to obtain streamlined support for bluetooth audio.

Unfortunately, not there yet. Blueman, the bluetooth setup GUI, can pair with my bluetooth Audiosonic loudspeaker, and when that happens, pavucontrol, the pulseaudio mixer, shows it as an audio output.

After rebooting, if I turn on the loadspeaker, it makes a "dingle" sound to indicate successful pairing, and indeed blueman shows it as connected. However, pavucontrol doesn't see it.

I have to completely remove the Audiosonic loudspeaker from blueman, perform a search then connect, for pavucontrol to see it.

This is not an unknown problem, found lots of posts about this problem. In fact, there are a plethora of posts about pulseaudio problems. After much reading, my eyes glaze over.

Yes, there are some suggested solutions for my particular problem, but nothing has worked so far.

EDIT 2020-10-11:
Narrowing the problem down a bit. If I turn on my Audiosonic BT speaker, it connects automatically, and blueman shows it as connected. However, pulseaudio (PA) cannot see it. In blueman, I have to choose "disconnect" then "connect" and then pulseaudio sees it.

I have followed online advice. The appropriate PA modules are loaded, after X11 has started (as advised), but still PA does not recognise a new connected BT device.

I have read various suggestions why this is happening, including blueman causing interference. I don't think this is an insurmountable problem, so it is not going to stop me from continuing to use PA. The extra step is a nuisance, and hopefully the problem will be solved.

Today I am working on 'mscw', the Multiple Sound Card Wizard, located at /usr/sbin/mscw, making it work with PA.

One interesting thing:

# aplay /usr/share/audio/2barks.au
Playing Sparc Audio '/usr/share/audio/2barks.au' : Mu-Law, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono
# paplay /usr/share/audio/2barks.au

An ongoing problem we have had with alsa is short audio files getting truncated. Using 'aplay', the two barks is cutoff so I only hear one bark. However, 'paplay', the PA equivalent, plays the full file, I hear the two barks. That's good news.

Here are earlier posts about 'mscw'. Note that I used 'bluez-alsa' then, as did not have PA:

https://bkhome.org/news/202001/sound-card-wizard-now-handles-bluetooth.html

https://bkhome.org/news/202001/easyos-version-223-released.html

https://bkhome.org/news/202001/hardware-profiling-for-audio.html 

Tags: easy