Help setting up bluetooth headphones with ALSA

[phodgson11]

Hello,

I've followed the guide on the wiki for bluetooth headsets, and gotten everything to work, but it's not gotten me what I expected: you have to pass the 'bluealsa' device to the application before you run it, so already running applications can't switch, and some applications don't even have that as an option. Making it the default device fixes the latter, but not the former.

I want to be able to switch from my laptop speakers to the bluetooth headset on the fly, so I would like the bluetooth headset to be added as another output for the default alsa device, similar to the speakers and headphone jack, which can be independently muted, so I could just toggle between muting the speakers and muting the headset with amixer. Is it possible to do this?

I don't have much experience with audio programming and ALSA, especially asound.conf, is very cryptic to me. Any help or links to tutorials would be much appreciated. Or let me know if this is a problem which can only be solved with another layer of software like Pulseaudio.